Time and Tide
by aragonite
Summary: The Two Doctors have parted ways in Seville; BUT...The Sontarans are still in Space. The Time Lords are planning. The Third Zone is about to be very unhappy about the slaughter of civilians on Space Station Chimera. Guess who has to clean up the mess? Characters: Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, unspec. Time Lords
1. Chapter 1

**TIME AND TIDE: Bourach  
**

This is part of the TIDERAKER series, which will be completely in 6B and draws in EACH CELL THAT BEATS, THE POWERS OF TWO, BETWEEN THE WALLS OF THE WORLDS, EACH CELL THAT BEATS and ANAM CARA.

Summary: The Two Doctors have parted ways in Seville; The Second and Third Doctors have survived an accidental temporal encounter in the Wooden Console Room. BUT...The Sontarans are still in Space. The Time Lords are planning. The Third Zone is about to be very unhappy about the slaughter of civilians on Space Station Chimera.

Guess who has to clean up the mess?

Characters: Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, unspecified Time Lords.

Warning: A mercifully brief but very ugly scene of violence. If you've listened to Shockeye talk about food, you probably won't be surprised. Also, there is an explanation for the Androgums and the Doctors' out-of-character racist reactions to the brutes.

* * *

"Oh, Doctair." Jamie said without thinking. "It's a _bourach_!" (mess)

"Yes, Jamie." The Doctor agreed tiredly. His dulled green eyes barely moved from the viewing screen. "It is a big one."

They had been bracing themselves for the inevitable horror of what they would see once they neared Space Station Chimera.

Sometimes even their imagination wasn't up to the task.

* * *

The Piper could only stare, stricken and a little sick at heart, at what he had first seen as a shining city-a beacon of light and hope.

Now Chimera sat dead and dark and hopeless-another dead thing in the deadness of space. It had no more spark to it than the occasional glint of light reflected off a passing comet or chunk of volcanic glass.

Jamie tasted ash in his mouth. The Sontarans had done much more than destroy the lives on Space Station Chimera. They wrecked something even more precious: the pursuit of knowledge for the betterment of other lives besides their own. Chimera, despite its being named for a ferocious beast, had been an emblem for the Galaxy's soul-a soul seeking enlightenment and evolution.

It was a poignant irony that this soul had been laid waste by one of its own attempts for enlightenment: the self-absorbed but dangerously advanced Chessene.

_"An Eden had been the goal," The Doctor's Sixth Self had proclaimed to Jamie and Peri, low and melodic. "But this time there was no Serpent in the garden. They made that all their own."_

That Doctor and Peri were long gone in space and time; back in their own rightful Timelines, but Jamie thought of the tall, colorful poet often. There was something harder about him, his eyes shouting out deep wounds carried even deeper below his skin. He wondered if this was the legacy the CIA was leaving on his Doctor with their dirty missions and dirtier motives.

And yet, he reminded himself, this Doctor still had something of his childlike innocence, his simple joy of being. It was a great comfort to the Piper to know the CIA had not been able to crush this quality out of existence.

For this was the Doctor's most precious gift. It was a rare being who could keep a childlike heart when they grew up; rarer still when they saw the true horrors of the world. And this little man, for all his bluff and clowning, had destroyed entire races in the name of necessity. He killed, _personally_, with weapons of his own hand and mind and he mourned the necessity each and every time...and he never hesitated. That a little child that loved to play still existed in those crystal-clear eyes to carry a healthy spark still in his future self four lives in the future was a gem of knowledge rarer than any material wealth the Piper could dream of.

He slipped his gaze to the little man, but the Doctor for once didn't notice. He looked shrunken inside his too-large clothes, his button-bright eyes tarnished like silver left too long in seawater. But his hands worried the Piper the most: they were always moving about the Console with some purpose, some calculation either absent or conscious-not unlike a composer's fingers as they stroked ivory keys. For one of the few times in Jamie's experience, the Doctor was not doing anything with his hands. They were lifeless.

Because he didn't know what else to do, Jamie moved closer so they could stand, side by side, and watch the metal tomb grow ever closer.

* * *

"Thank God Victoria didn't come with us." He said at last.

"Yes." The little Time Lord agreed quietly. When they thought of what would have happened to her...it was actually a lot of comfort.

"We'll put her in an outside orbit, Jamie." The Doctor said at last. "I want full readings of the entire Station before we go in this time." Finally, his hands moved, slow and steady across the scanning tools.

"How long will that take, Doctair?"

"Full scan-at least ten minutes." His mouth set, the Doctor looked down as he worked, though he didn't need to see a single thing to operate the TARDIS. He knew the Timeship now, better than he ever did, but the sight beyond the TARDIS was just too awful to study. Jamie sighed and went to the old wooden chair closeby, feeling every inch of his years.

And to think he'd wanted Victoria to come with them on this one.

Guilt washed him. He was being selfish, he knew. He just wanted her back in his life as if it were the old days-but it wasn't the old days, and it couldn't be the old days again.

* * *

He didn't know that the Doctor was thinking of Victoria just as acutely as he was just now; it wouldn't have surprised them. For all their differences, they thought alike in matters of the heart.

The small Time Lord had paused in the middle of his own murky ruminations, feeling his pulse beat gently through his palms to the smooth, warm controls that wired him directly to the brain of the TARDIS. He watched the young human ponder in the gloom of his own thoughts, and kept his own to himself. It was better to spare Jamie from this.

Even when it _had_ been the old days, it hadn't been particularly good for Victoria. But what, they wondered privately, would they tell her when she asked of their mission? She would be concerned; she would _want_ to know and she knew when they were padding out the truth with nonsense...but..? Victoria was always their reluctant adventurer; she had been orphaned and the Doctor had taken her into his life without a thought; her father had died saving the Doctor though she didn't know the full details.

The Doctor had done his best to do right by Victoria-He'd raised up his own granddaughter, after all-and Susan's artistry and fragility of spirit had much in common with the human child. The difference was, Susan would have never left him willingly. The Universe would have dripped blood and she wouldn't have ran away; she would have clung to him all the harder. And Victoria would have easily been like Susan in that respect, if he had been more like the late Professor Waterfield: inquisitive, protective, and yet idealistically naive.

But try as he might, the Doctor could not be the father Victoria needed him to be-not and still be himself. Victoria had known this long before any of them. His failure had been no one's fault, but it was still a failure and one felt as keenly as watching Jamie and Zoe leaving him for (as he'd believed) forever.

Finding her directly after the Great Intelligence's attempted coup with the Brigadier and his daughter had been...fortuitous timing if not a crafty calculation on part of his TARDIS. They were starting over in many ways, and this time, the Doctor vowed for the sake of Jamie and Victoria, he wouldn't fail this time. Victoria _would_ find what she needed: safety and purpose. He just had to make certain the opportunity would be there.

Not that that time would be near in the future, he thought sourly. Not with her in quarantine with Zoe deep in the heart of the CIA's private portion of the Citadel!

_Just think of something_, he reminded himself. _More than anything else, they'll want to know that the two of you came back safe and sound. The rest should take care of itself..._

* * *

Six hours later, they were only a little closer to finding the information the Time Lords needed.

The Doctor was deep in Dastari's office, yanking cluttered bits out of an inset wall-locker. A dead technician sprawled next to it decently covered by a plastic cloth.

The little man's silver hair glowed like smooth metal in the changing lights of the Station and his face set in tight, controlled lines of concentration. Jamie had seen this expression often on the Doctor and Zoe. It always meant the same thing: the big brains behind the eyes were cataloging information as fast as they were getting it, stuffing it in mind-shelves and boxes and letters to take out and examine later, while at the same time making notes of anything out of the ordinary. The Piper sighed to himself, mourning the passing of the Doctor's initial giddy mood once his freedom had finally been hard-won from Chessene.

Chessene. The Doctor might have room in his hearts to feel pity for that Devil Woman, now that it was over and they'd won the game of survival, but Jamie could not. Would not. She had known the harm she was causing; she hadn't cared. They would be cleaning up her mess for years, the way things looked.

With Chessene's subterfuge, they had not only framed the Time Lords for the Doctor's and Dastari's faked murder, they had also tampered with the vast memory banks that held such vital knowledge for the Galaxies. Finding Dastari's false journal entries had almost been "anti-climactic" after that, though Jamie noted the Doctor was careful to stuff the damning book deep into his pocket.

"Dastari had _not_ been exaggerating when he'd said she was "sucking up knowledge." The Doctor said quietly, and barely moving his lips as he did so. He was _that_ annoyed. Bluster and bellow all he chose-mostly at Daleks-Jamie found the Doctor was at his angriest and most dangerous when he was in a state of what Polly had described as "tranquil rage."

_"And if you think he's scary like this now, he was a lot more frightening when he wore his old body. You could believe he would murder someone in cold blood when he wore that face!"_

A warning crackle sputtered from the mostly-deactivated Chimera's Computer, and the Time Lord whirled to face his nemesis, eyes glittering like Roman glass as his teeth gnashed.

"Is that stupid thing trying to come _back_?" He demanded hotly.

"It looks like it..." Jamie was already backing to the cork-lined carpet, hand fruitlessly upon the handle of his new _sgian dhu._

**Spppp-p-ZzzzZZZZZZZZt! (crackle) "Innnnnntruuuuuuuuuudddd...(pop)...rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr..."**

His temper finally activated, the Doctor stalked his way to the remains of the stubborn machine, hand yanking out a brass-headed hammer from the depths of his coat pocket.

Jamie hovered behind the desk for safety, his hands and toolkit on the ready. Getting into the station again had been but half the problem; the other half had been getting to the Computer in one piece as the daft machine had recovered in Jamie's absence—enough that it had thrown a repeat of its attack against the Doctor's Sixth self and Peri. The Doctor's already frail mood had thoroughly rotted out by the time they'd reached the right floor.

Jamie was keeping track of the increasingly vexed language coming out of his mouth for future reference.

"Confounded, idiotic..."

The Doctor struck the computer in the middle of the console with the hammer, causing a fountain of purple sparks to shoot up almost to the acoustical tiles. "Well, would you look at that," he said in satisfaction.

Jamie too had noted the color of the sparks. "Nitre?" He wondered. It was a common enough "toy" from his childhood to throw gunpowder chemicals into a roaring bonfire.

"IN-teresting..." The small man agreed. "Now why would he layer oxidizers into his computer..." He set back on his heels and tugged hard upon a casing made of some odd-looking material, a mixture of plastic and metal.

"Stupid...I'm going to find that thing's laughable excuse for a brain and-"

Jamie's neck prickled from his own spate of nerves. This Chimera had been his tomb for a fortnight and he didn't want to come back, but his own sense of duty forbade his complaint. The dead needed proper respect before their ghosts made a permanent home of this Station.

**Crackle-pop!**

"Plenum-brained..!"

Jamie only knew what _plenum_ meant thanks to years of exposure to the Doctor and Zoe. He thought it was rather fitting.

"There-!"

The Doctor went flying backwards, barely rescued by Jamie's waiting hand, and the casing hit the wall with a trail of loose wires and things that looked like oblong silver beads, magnetized upon each other. The Computer squealed like a high-pitched pig and gabbled before making a sound not unlike a badly-patched and broken set of pipes tossed into a corner and left to deflate, one pipe at a time. A thin plume of smoke drifted sadly upwards.

"That's a sound that'll never catch on." Jamie said in satisfaction, wishing for more of a funeral pyre than that little puff of smoke.

"Wretched machine." The Doctor proclaimed. His silver hair fluffed up from the collected static charge of Dastari's antique carpet. He grimaced, braced himself, and deliberately touched an odd metal art sculpture on the desk. With a POP the charge dissipated, and he shook his hand with a fresh layer of scowl on his face. He spared the leaking pieces a final condemnation. _"If you were sentient-!"_ He shouted.

"Feel better yet?"

"_Much_."

Jamie patted him on the back.

The wee chappie's body was nothing near as quick and flexible as it had been back in what he was starting to catalog as "the old days," and "the good days." With a huff he rolled his head, rubbing at a neck grown stiff from his struggles. "There. Completely disconnected from the Station. No more worrying about getting killed."

"At least nae by that thing." Jamie reminded him.

"My word you can be a pessimist."

"I learnt from the best."

The Doctor padded soundlessly on the cork and carpeted floor, held up the string of silver beads, and hummed a directionless melody as he detached them, one by one, and stuffed them into a small white box labeled with Gallifreyan words.

"What's that for, Doctor?"

"Information for the Time Lords." The Doctor smiled. They had been pretending for years that Jamie could barely read and write his own language, and the deception worked well enough that the Time Lords (so far) had no idea he was quite good at reading and writing in Gallifreyan. Being unable to refrain himself from rebelling against stupidity, the Doctor first grounded him in the Old language, feeling that a form his own people avoided meant a double advantage. Jamie was an excellent student, needing only a brief immersion to grasp the patterns. He was a rare gift of a being regardless of his species, but above all he was an excellent dissembler.

As good as his mentor, but being human, had to work less at seeming stupid. Especially around other Time Lords.

* * *

"Well! That's that." The Doctor dusted his hands free of metallic matter and took a deep breath. "Now to have a peek at the Environmental controls...no sense making it safe for boarding if we run out of air."

"I'll be glad just to get the stench gone." Jamie said glumly.

"Not a problem, Jamie. Just a moment..." The Doctor found what he was looking for, and tapped out a quick command. Without warning, invisible machines inside the walls activated and the stench of death and decay almost instantly dissipated. Jamie was so relieved he blinked back tears.

"Oh, my." The Doctor murmured. "That is an improvement." He kept poking about, his face set and grimly curious as he pulled up image after image of the dead upon the Station. "Oh, that should do it."

"What are ye doing?"

"Saving the images." The Doctor pulled a thin, flat square out of the console and stuffed it in his pocket. "I'm not going to delay this any longer than I have to, Jamie. You get yourself some rest-"

"I'll noo leave you." Jamie managed not to shout, but it was a close thing.

The Doctor froze, stopping short of flinching. "Quite right, Jamie." He said quietly. It wasn't an apology; it went deeper. The Doctor was still aware of possible eavesdropping and not just by Time Lords. He was assuring Jamie that he knew how he felt. They were both terrified of being separated again. "It's just that this will be..._unpleasant_ and I didn't want you to think you had to do this, because you don't have to."

"You're going tae see tae the dead, aren't ye?" Jamie lifted his eyebrows. "That's noo job for a single man, and seein' as how we're the only survivors o' the massacre, 'tis fitting we both do it."

"Of course." The Doctor agreed softly. "We'll have to start at the morgue. Although I'm sure they don't have much of one...more like a place to store specimens for research."

Jamie shuddered. "How'd they keep 'em out of the Androgums' hands?"

"I'd tell you, but you wouldn't like it." The Doctor warned him, flat serious.

"Then I'll noo ask. Ever."

* * *

The Doctor plugged into the databases, reluctantly re-confirmed there were no other signs of life, and sealed off all but their central portion of Chimera. He expressed worry about the available capacity of the station for storing the bodies, but for now they had to concentrate on one thing at a time. The Time Lords would be concentrating on the brain of the station and saving the extraneous departments for their actual workers. Past experience with them—as well as _being _them—the Doctor wanted to clean things up a bit first.

Sealing off all the outer compartments did much to conserve Chimera's vital power reserves. The Doctor then slowed the decay on their section by sealing off the floors and suspending the oxygen, putting the temperature down as low as possible without actually flash-freezing the bodies. Things were hard enough without struggling to enshroud a frozen, sprawled-everywhere was grisly work. They donned filtered masks against the brunt of the stench, and protective suits. There had been more than the 39 scientists on the station: each were leaders of their own teams of assistants, technicians, and environmental controllers, guests, and ambassadors and of course, the kitchen and wait staff and traffickers.

* * *

Two men, even dedicated ones motivated in some part by Survivor's Guilt, can't be expected to do that much on their own, but by the end of the first day they'd managed to find, identify, bag up and store twenty of the nearest dead into an increasingly crowded laboratory freezer.

* * *

Jamie had by now learned more of forensics than he'd ever dreamed or wanted, and asked the Doctor would it be better to leave the dead simply covered until the Time Lords could examine the crimes personally. The Doctor's sad answer was that the Time Lords could easily pull the particulars out of their minds and prove the data genuine. Jamie blanched, swallowed and concentrated on wrapping a severed humanoid limb in a plastic casing.

* * *

"For what it's worth, Jamie," the Doctor had paused to stand upright a moment, hands pressing upon his lower back. "The only important question will be who killed them—and Sontaran proofs are all over this sad place."

"Aye." Jamie bowed his head under the chilly lights. It was awful how much worse the station had become now that he'd escaped it for barely a day. "But if Chessene wanted to frame the Time Lords for this massacre, couldn't the Time Lords' Temporal Screens show what really happened?"

"The Time Lords are going to be on trial before the Third Zone, Jamie. Only the Third Zone's equipment and investigations will count—or would you trust someone like the War Chief to produce evidence in his own innocence?"

"And they're not sae powerful as tae bow tae this?"

"There are a few things in the Universe that the Time Lords still fear, Jamie...and these things can always collect more allies. Who better to be an ally than those with mutual enemies?"

"Aye...Are we ready to move these to the cold rooms?"

"Almost." The Doctor puffed slightly as they moved the latest corpse to the top of the anti-gravity gurney. Careful movement on their part allowed them the luxury of moving three at a time. This time they had four: a child-sized alien was on top of the pile, which disturbed Jamie even though the Doctor had assured him the being had been fully grown and well mature: "You can tell by the curve of the tusks she was probably a great-grandmother." Maybe so, but it still made him sad.

"Oh, bother."

"What is it?"

"I think the last cart filled up the first freezer. Can you check the other one? We might have to take out a few things but it _is_ a walk-in freezer and it ought to be sufficient for a few more remains." He gnawed on his bottom lip in a sudden thought. "I might have to convert the cafeteria to another morgue," he muttered. "They weren't prepared for anything like this...stupid of them, really. Space epidemics and plagues happen all the time..."

"I couldnae' open the freezers when I was here." Jamie reminded him patiently.

"Mn? Oh. Here." The Doctor crunched across a floor thickened with frost crystals and thumbed open the front casing of a fancy looking electrically coded lock before the Freezer's double doors. He tossed the case over his shoulder and poked at the insides with the tip of a copper paperclip.

The lock whined at its treatment, protested, whined some more and finally showed its surrender by falling apart. The Doctor winced slightly (he'd grown to hate certain pitches between sound and steel).

"Aye, Doctor." Lost in his thoughts and thinking of a warm bath and a cup of something even warmer, Jamie tilted his head back, yawned and tugged open the door to the freezer in question. A wall of cold air washed over his face-mask, tickling his lashes with floating frost-grains. Jamie finished yawning, and lowered his head level even as his eyes opened.

"_Doctor_!" He shrieked.

The Doctor came running, slipping on the frosty floor.

"Oh!" He exclaimed. Large plastic bags sealed against freezer-burn hung from ceiling-hooks and supports. _"Oh, Jamie, get back! Get away from there!"_

Jamie was already doing so. Half-sobbing for air, he whirled and slammed the door behind him, He hadn't clutched at the doctor since he was a boy, but the little man's strong grip had never been so welcome. He gasped with lungs shrunken from horror, tears trembling in his eyes.

"Oh, Jamie..." The Doctor was mourning, pulling his head down and running his gloves across the top of Jamie's protective hood. "Jamie, I'm so sorry...I'm so, so sorry...let's get you away from that thing. I didn't...I didn't _think_, Jamie..!"

"Ah, Doctor!" Jamie choked, trying his best to breathe. "Their own people! Their own people!"

"Jamie..." Spent as he was, the Doctor was still stronger than Jamie, but it was a trial to get him away from the Androgum's food locker without hurting him. Jamie had simply seen and endured too much. "I didn't think," he muttered. "That old fool! He probably took Chessene at her word when she said they were following the Covenants of the Station!" But his face wrenched as he said it; Dastari had been a friend at one time, even if a corrupted one.

"How could they?" Jamie was panting, trying to hold a full-fledged panic at bay. "Eating their own people?"

"They're Androgums, Jamie! They think cannibalism is just another privilege of living at the top of their food chain!" He shook the Piper gently, hoping to restore his senses. "That's enough for now." He said firmly.

"We're nae finished."

"We're finished for now, listen to me!" The Doctor tried again. "We can finish later, but...let's get out of this place for a bit."

"But the others..."

"Jamie." The Doctor swallowed hard and put his gloves on the sides of the Piper's face. He stared through the cold air, boring into his bloodshot eyes. "This can wait. Right now, I'm more worried about you, alive, than I am about a cart of dead folk."

Jamie struggled to breathe in without falling apart. "I wasn't ready to see that." He stammered.

"That's because you're a good person, Jamie." The Doctor's eyes were flat and bleak.

* * *

After that, they were quite exhausted. They peeled off the filthy coveralls outside the TARDIS before walking in, and managed to get through the motions of washing up and eating before (as the plan had it), falling into an exhausted sleep for a few hours before starting again. It was doubtful if any amount of scrubbing could get the feel of the work off their hands, or the images out of their eyes. Jamie was disturbed that he was getting thick-skinned against all of this death, and sat in a passive daze until the Doctor pressed a cup of steaming crowberry tea brewed from the Highlander's hills into his hands. He sipped it absently as the Doctor slid a bowl of milk and bread and tiny wild bilberries to his elbow.

"Aye, thanks." Jamie said quietly. He was fairly certain he didn't have the nerve to eat any flesh, or anything brightly colored, or even a bowl of porridge after all the exposure to the dead. The Doctor had figured that out by himself.

"Not at all, Jamie." The Doctor's head was down as he busied himself with peeling a banana. His own cup of tea smelled like bog myrtle. His breakfast bowl was half-filled with cloudberries.

The Piper smiled to himself, recalling their too-brief vacation.

"Now what's got you smiling?" The Doctor smiled gently back across the table.

Jamie didn't reply at first. He didn't have to. The Doctor was content to get an answer in the person's own time, their own way. He sipped more of his tea in silence for a minute. "Thinking back to when we picked those berries for Victoria and Zoe," he said at last. "It was a perfect day, wasna? Sky clear as glass, an' the tide pools full o'white foam and oysters."

"And the birds," The Doctor's eyes slipped to a faraway expression, watching something in his mind. "All of those birds, just carrying away, singing and diving into the water or flying headfirst into the stormclouds coming off the mainland." He stirred his cup without tasting it. "Finding all of those agate fossils for Zoe..."

"And ye went swimmin' in that freezing water."

"Freezing to you."

"Ugh. We had fun."

"Yes..." The Doctor agreed, but his careworn face gentled into a very faraway expression indeed, as something crossed his thoughts. His green eyes rested upon the Piper, all of him, and what Jamie thought of as "that look" was in the bottom of those two brilliant little wells into the soul.

The Doctor was committing him to memory, wanting to stop Time for just a moment, and create something that would carry on through his long lives.

Jamie was long used to this phenomenon with the Doctor, though he didn't know it for what it was until recently, when the full potential of the man's life span became clear. But...why now?

Ah.

"Are ye thinking o' The Guide Neighbors again?" He asked quietly.

The expression shuttered, stilled for a moment. The Green eyes flickered and the Doctor moved, breaking the spell of Time and drinking his tea. "Just a bit, yes."

"All's well that ends well, Doctair." Jamie reminded him.

"It very nearly didn't end well at all, you know." Disgruntled, the little man leaned his chin into his free hand as the other held his wisping cup below his throat. Steam licked up the sides of his face as though he was some sort of Oracle. "Of all the places to find you, Jamie..! Of all the Companions I've ever travelled with, the one that would _know_ to avoid the Sidhe just _happens_ to be the one to fall in their world!" Exasperation ruled the old man's face as he glared reproachfully-not directed as Jamie as much as the strange pitfalls in life itself.

"I didnae mean tae fall anywhere, and we got out." Jamie grinned. His grin softened to a rueful smile. "And ye know, someday, we'll have tae go back for the Brigadier."

"And we will." The Doctor leaned over and gripped the young human's forearm. "Right now he's busy fixing up all those...er...problems, But when the Time is right, we'll go back and ask if he wants to stay or leave. He does have grandchildren he'd like to see, you know!"

But Jamie's thoughts were moored not to the Otherworld, but to what was outside the TARDIS, and thinking of children yanked him back to that terrible place. He felt his cheeks cool as they paled, and he put his cup down to stare through the golden liquid.

"Jamie?"

"How can people eat people? Their own people even?"

The Doctor closed his eyes for a moment. "They're Androgums, Jamie. You've heard me complain about them...and heard Dastari defend Chessene's Androgum portion often enough!" He rubbed his fingertips along the smooth teacup. "Most people don't know...Androgums are...a created race."

"They're manufactured? Like in a machine? Like Cybermen and Daleks?"

"Not quite, but that's how they began. They were created by a very powerful race a long time ago—long ago even by my standards—and by people who really ought to have known better. They were..." He stopped and cleared his throat, said something in a low, gutteral tongue that sounded somewhat German without a scrap of its music within vowel and consonant.

"Did ye just call em 'Mud Groaners?"

"Yes...very nasty name. The host species for the bulk of their genetic coding translates to "Groan in the Mud" or "Mud Groan"...a primitive people living in a barely hospitable planet! Androgum is an anagram of Mud-Groan. Not a very good one if you ask me..." He paused to shudder. "They were given enough cranial enhancement to make them very different from their forefathers...different enough that they only see them as another source of food." He sipped his tea quickly. "They were created to have boundless energy and focus on their tasks."

"Slaves?"

"Precisely. In this era...there were...rumblings...about the moral position of slavery. Even people that you might ordinarily admire were in support of it, whilst there could be people you would have loathed and perhaps killed on sight were against it! The time was just _troubled_, Jamie. Creating Androgums was a simple solution in a complicated time: A manufactured race of self-perpetuating savages that actually need to be enslaved because of their limitless physical resource and single-minded focus, with an endless potential for violence...it's very easy to enslave people who are themselves enslaved by their own desires, Jamie. Androgums are very proud that their purest rule is the gratification of pleasure."

"That's awful." Jamie breathed.

"As you might imagine, they make excellent slaves so long as one keeps them under the tightest possible reign and control their urges. Over time they developed a highly intricate system of clans and that made them a little more...interactive...with other species but they've never achieved a higher level than that of chatelaine or chef or circus strongman. Dastari was just one of the many people who, blinded by the light of his own intellect, thought he knew and understood the lessor ones and I daresay he thought his higher intelligence as well as the age of his race made him morally responsible to lift the Androgums to a higher level."

That meant Dastari's people might have had a hand in the Androgum's making. "He was very protective of her, wasn't he?" Jamie mused. "He thought she was better than Androgum...would some day be better than Minyan."

"He thought to re-write history...make the wheel better. It's a common mistake of arrogance. Androgums _can't_ change, Jamie. That was the first law written into their genetic coding. They're in an evolutionary box canyon. They bow and scrape to races like mine and think yours are beneath theirs."

"Aye, but we're good enough to eat." Jamie muttered.

"Jamie, if I'd known the mission would turn this bad I never would have brought you."

"And ye'd be dead fer a fact." Jamie told him.

"I'd be fine with that." Sometimes the little man could be utterly frightening.

"I wouldn't be."

"I won't ever happily put your life at risk, Jamie. I'll do it, and I can and have done so, but I will never once look at your life like a score in a game."

Jamie's cheeks burned at the intensity in the Doctor's soft words. "Doctair..."

"Yes, Jamie?"

"Ye were worried about this mission from the get-go, weren't ye?"

The Doctor finally nodded. "I'm afraid so."

"Thought'sa. The way ye were acting in front of Dastari..." It had taken almost a lifetime for Jamie to mention the dead by name and not flinch. It was a heady freedom, but in this case he also didn't want to think of the man. "It isn't like ye to send the TARDIS off wi'out us..."

"Oh, that wasn't me. That was the Time Lords. You might say that confirmed my suspicions. They told me precious little to begin with, and normally they like to give me too much information (most of it useless). But this..." He shook his head. "The Third Zoners will be absolutely furious when this gets out." He rubbed at his forehead, eyes closing in fatigue. "Two weeks, Jamie. There _should_ have been some sort of rescue or intelligence group by now. The fact that my future self in the TARDIS was the only one who could board means more than I want to know about Sontaran activity!"

Jamie was still nervous about thinking of the future Doctor. "Ye think the Sontarans're still around?"

"I _know_ they're still around. They're hard-headed to a fault and patient as the rock they've got for a brain. They'll wait at least another two weeks before the lack of a report will force them to change their plans and I've no doubt they've been holding back and attacking anyone trying to get into the Station." He caught Jamie's growing alarm. "As long as we do nothing to alert their suspicions we should be safe enough. The Time Lords will get here soon and then they'll _really _back off." He snorted darkly.

"Aye, but why haven't they shown up by now?" Jamie asked. "When ye summoned them from the War Planet...it didnae take 'em time at all!"

"Don't remind me. No, you're right, but temporal interference of the level of the War Lord is most unusual, Jamie. To be honest, it's practically unheard of in recent history."

"How recent?"

"About 20,000 years." The Doctor shrugged. "Not so long in the scheme of things."

"Oh, aye..."

The Doctor's look was fond and rueful. "Now, Jamie. When we're talking about time travel, the most important thing to remember is, one can't invent something they don't believe in. Necessity is the monkey wrench of invasion."

"Ye mean a man who doesn't need a hammer will never make one."

"Very good. Yes. And even more importantly, after the need comes a concept. No one ever accidentally made a Time Machine because they were making a rubber duck."

"I can see that. So ye'r saying that the Time Lords are waiting tae show up because what happened isn't as important."

"If I must guess as to their opaque and labyrinthine motives," The Doctor sucked in his cheeks, rolling the situation around with a mouthful of tea, "they're more concerned with damage control to the Third Zone, assessing the Sontaran presence, and figuring out how they can deal with both as neatly and as invisibly as possible. A quick solution is as loud as a shout, and they simply do not like to bring attention to themselves." His face darkened. "If they follow the usual Third Zone protocols, they'll have their meeting here on the Station since this is where the massacre happened. They won't like it, but they'll want to be politic about the Third Zone's feelings and that will be a step in the right direction."

"Aye." Jamie drank his tea and ate a few berries. The food settled lightly in his stomach, and he began to feel better. "Glad that we're cleaning this part of it up..." They both had survivor's guilt, he thought gloomily. The Doctor because he was part of the reason why everyone had been slaughtered in the first place. And himself because he had been clever enough to hide from the Sontarans when no one else, with all their intelligence, could.

"If we keep it up, we should have it all taken care of in a few days." The Doctor assured him. "Just remember to pace yourself and not overdo it."

"I will if ye will. Ye're no more recovered than I am, and I think ye were going through a lot more than I was."

"If we argued about that, we'd be stuck in the TARDIS for years. Is that all that's on your mind?" The Doctor snapped just a bit, but he didn't push, which was a relief to them both. Jamie was glad. His maroonment with the dead had scarred him deeply, but the Doctor was affected too. He was quakey and paled too easily. Being unconscious for two weeks surely hadn't done his body good.

And Time Lord or not, Jamie refused to believe that he could just throw off Androgum DNA like an unwanted sock.

"Well." Jamie cleared his throat, staring down at his hands for a moment. "All this aboot the Third Zone. It sounds like it's important, but I'm a little confused as to how important."

"Oh, my word, you do like to ask questions, don't you?" The Doctor waved away Jamie's rising apology. "No, no, I don't mean what you think I mean, Jamie. It's just...it's a loaded question." He finished his bowl and, clearly still hungry, went rummaging for something else. Jamie waited patiently until he returned with a bag of what the Highlander thought was one of his more bizarre notions of food: dried gooseberries (which were gloriously tasty), sprinkled with chile powder (which was not). The Doctor insisted this was a common treat on Earth, but it wasn't in Jamie's lands.

"The Third Zone," the Doctor said as he finished chewing, "Is part of Mutter's Spiral, only not close enough for Earth to be interfered with much by their doings. Thank goodness. Level 5 Planets have enough to worry about from outside influences." He frowned at a large berry and popped it in his mouth with a crunch. "It's a loose term for nine planetary systems—in the old days there were more. They've been technologically advanced for a long time."

"Dastari acted like he knew a lot of what was going on wi' the Time Lords, but he didn't look or act like one of 'em."

"Dastari's people are Gallifreyan Colonists. They left the homeworld anywhen from a half million to one million years ago. The last I looked into things, Gallifrey had the official list of 'recognized colonial species' to some three dozen. The legal definitions used to depend on people from Gallifrey who settled with permission of the government, but for most purposes today it means anyone who fits the anatomical spectrum and, who can claim with some truth, an ancestry back to Gallifrey." The Doctor sipped his tea. "Dastari's a Minyan. They tend to avoid a higher level of computer technology, but they embrace what they find useful, like transmats and hyperdrive craft. Gallifrey's a bit of a stick when it comes to interacting with most races, but they know it's a bad idea to completely ignore the offshoots of their stock race."

"Aye, you were talking to him like you would a really hard-headed Time Lord." Jamie nodded. "All that talk about race and nature." Jamie fidgeted. "I'm not used tae that. Normally I'm hearin' you defend other peoples...especially mine. Everyone says we're primitive and...well, not worthy of even lookin' at."

"You know that's not true. I've defended humans to more than just the Time Lords, Jamie. It's a popular myth that humans are the most destructive race in the Universe. A good one, yes, but it's still a myth. Humans _rarely_ kill their own planets off."

"P-planets?" Jamie repeated.

"Oh, yes. There will be thousands of them in the galaxies before you know it." The Doctor smiled at the notion. Then his smile faded. "It's your _age_, Jamie. Compared to so many other peoples out there, Humans are one of the youngest of races out there, and despite the fact that your natural development has been arrested by other parties more times than even I can count-you just bounce right back! The Time Lords aren't the only ones who don't like the fact that you learn so fast."

"Hah. At least I can claim I don't do that."

"You do sell yourself short." The Doctor said patiently. "Jamie..." He chased a dried gooseberry in the bottom of his bowl for a moment, then gave up. "Being overtired will make anyone lose control. Is there anything you'd like to do that would...help unwind before we try to sleep?"

"Oh, I dinnae. Something where I wouldn't have to think." He caught himself. "None o' those number games!"

"I wouldn't dream of it," The Doctor protested with an almost believable face. "Come on. Let's see if the mosses have finished taking in the Swimming Room."

"Yer wantin' us to go watch the moss grow? That'll relax me for sair!" But Jamie's grumble was half-hearted. He'd almost forgotten the Swimming Room, which the Doctor had made at great personal effort to look like a protected little sea-pool off the coast off the Western Isles.

* * *

Jamie hadn't seen the Room since they'd left Earth the last time, and he remembered it as a half-finished mess of rock, earth, and something to do with lining the walls with a special glass. Either he'd been away longer than he'd thought, or the TARDIS liked the room and was doing things to it in their absence. The old swimming pool had been sculpted into an old-style "bathing hole" of sea-rock and cliff. A spur of sand slipped down the lowest edge until it ran into the glass wall. The higher end blended with the illusion of a ragged cliff wall. Sea-kales and glassworts clung in bare clutches in the saltier portions while the aforementioned mosses made a determined climb up the still-exposed cliff.

"Oh, excellent!" The Doctor didn't clap his hands together (somehow he didn't seem to be that happy lately), but he did bounce up and down on his toes a few times. "Look at that, Jamie! A perfect little microcosm!"

"I feel like I'm in a fish—I mean terrarium." Jamie blinked up at the ceiling, but the artificial sunlight was too much and he looked down. Now he knew what the glass was all about: it made the room look as though it wasn't even there. Jamie had lived on the TARDIS long enough not to be fooled at fake air currents and sunlight, but the Doctor wasn't trying to copy Scotland, just honor it. He sniffed at a sudden sea spray appreciatively, and smiled as a sudden flock of birds slipped past their heads to vanish into the ocean on the other side of a rock-spill. "What would happen if I touched them?"

"Nothing that I know...the TARDIS came up with that one, not me. She really got into the spirit of things, didn't you, Old Girl." The Doctor beamed with deep fondness and gave a rough boulder a pat. "With luck she didn't collect any living beings this time...but you can never really be sure." He looked uncertain and cleared his throat. "Well! Good enough for a sit-down, eh? Interesting Neolithic oyster farm." The Doctor commented. "I wonder what made her replicate that?"

"What? The bathing pool?"

"They're bathing-pools in _your _time; your geographic ancestors built these low walls for their own purposes: Oysters Rockerfeller." The Doctor rocked on the balls of his feet again, hooking his thumbs into his braces. "Interesting! Hmn!"

Jamie grinned at the little fellow's antics. Sometimes he sounded just like a stuffy old man. "It's as perfect as it'll get." Jamie said with feeling, and promptly pulled off his coat, used it for a blanket, and sprawled on the grazzy hummock with his ears barely an ell from a tiny trickling freshet. Before he knew it he was asleep.

* * *

The Doctor continued standing where he was some time more, taking in the minute details of the changed room. The TARDIS rarely took initiative like this; he wondered if he dared take it as a hopeful sign that she was finally recovering from the transplant-shock of all the new parts from Gallifrey. Sometimes, a timeship couldn't adjust and like a human given the wrong replacement organ, rejected the change violently and fatally. It was but one of the many reasons why her module was obsolete and an embarrassment to the technicians.

Perhaps he was hanging on too long to his paranoia. The symbiotic bond with the Old Girl was something he now couldn't live without and the Agency was not exactly pleased about the extra complication this posed in their plans. From a strategic stand they were quite sensible to de-materialize the TARDIS off the Chimera when they first landed to meet with Dastari. Anyone who held his TARDIS would in effect have pinned him, more surely and tightly as Chessene had with her drugs.

And didn't the Time Lords know that.

He exhaled slowly through his nostrils, pondering wearily the problem of being the Time Lords' bondsman, with slight hopes of winning his freedom, or falling victim to whoever would have the horrid idea of holding his TARDIS hostage.

"What do you think?" He asked quietly. And he remained that way for a long time, while Jamie slept. If he heard a response to his question, no one else heard; he merely tilted his head to one side with an odd little smile, as if in communication with something too subtle to be detected by outside means.


	2. Good ServantBad Master

**Part 2: Good Servant, Bad Master**

* * *

The CIA's Madame Supervisor and two pursuivants regained dimensional form amidst alien surroundings.

Amazingly damp air thick of minerals and trace elements made a cloud in her nose, clung to the exposed skin of her face and hands, and stung her nostrils all the way into her brain. Behind her the pursuivants were standing at perfect attention, doubtless hoping she hadn't noticed how uncomfortable they were.

Before her, Parolee 2(9*200) never looked up; rude or polite? Time Lords _rarely_ failed to note another's presence. They were unlike the other denizens of Gallifrey in that respect. As usual, it was simpler to decide Parolee 2(9*200) was being polite. He doubtless didn't want to see one of his (many) ranking supervisors discomfited in any way, or perhaps he didn't want her to see that he was discomfited at her presence inside what was indisputably _his_ TARDIS.

When Goth left his post for bigger and better advancements, Madame Supervisor had thought him a little prejudicial against a good many of the prisoner-parolees. That opinion had not changed, for her convictions were as firm as bedrock. Still, she had come to see some of his view. Goth's narrow-minded and stiff-necked ambitions did not mix well with what made a Gallifreyan fail to be a proper citizen (which was most of their Agents). They were natural rule-breakers or they wouldn't be in trouble. They had all earned their tracking chips and lengthy checkpoints and to be honest...they had also earned the work-hours to regain the Gallifreyan honor with their condemned actions.

Parolee Agents were dangerous, but so was their work. The High Council preferred to stay ignorant about the many violated and reworked Timestreams, the "adjusted" truths and the dirty work that ensured Gallifrey remained in the center of the Universe whole and hale. The life expectancy of a typical Agent was less than a thousand years—an appallingly short time. They burned out, but the hope of being re-united with their suspended Timestreams was enough to keep them going.

She did not forget that this particular Parolee was so far being kept blessedly ignorant of his full timestream—not that they'd had much reason to send him into his own future more than a few times; it was just better in the long run to make certain he gained no knowledge that would help him escape. She did not look forward to instigating the backup plans in case he did learn of some of the sealed cases. Memory filters were a tricky thing to install upon a brain as complex as a Time Lord's, especially since the procedures were still under review...

Madame Supervisor tucked her hands inside her sleeves and waited; they were far enough away from each other that they could afford the manners of avoidance for a bit.

The small man kept on with what he was doing, which was play an odd little song on the Tellurian woodwind. He was sitting crosslegged on the grass with all the postural grace of a small child (not that he wasn't), and his human was sound asleep with his head on his lap. For all the world it looked like a father seeing to a child and it almost warmed what passed for her hearts. Time Lords were a people of privilege; they were selected and elite and separated from the rest of the Universe and even their own Gallifreyans. The price they paid for being the most superior beings in the multitudinous Universes was the loneliness of their rank. They all dealt with it in whatever way fit them best.

She dealt with the strain by studying plants. Goth had collected art. Gend rescued small animals; Ttoth had all but adopted half the Shobogans in his volunteer relief work across the less disreputable parts of the planet...the Doctor just kept alien pets. He wasn't the first one and he certainly wouldn't be the last. Intellectually she was glad he had some altruistic outlets. Not enough of their people were as concerned for the Universe outside of proper channels. The Acting Lord President was driven by charity as much as he was by work.

Thoughts of Lord Presidents made her very uncomfortable.

Of the top twenty things that the CIA worried about, the state of the Doctor's restricted memory were in three of them. The time was coming in which the Agency would have to decide what to do...they could all feel it. The man was too clever by half and controlling him was a nonstop aggravation and the protein-based memory filters that kept him ignorant of his futureselves' machinations grew increasingly delicate. His solve rate was unparalleled but so was his ability to do things "his way."

It was going to require finesse and determination in equal measure. And doubtless...some more rule-breaking. She wasn't looking forward to the day where she had to open his file and finally key the encrypted source-coded lock in the very last file inside the file. That would tell the CIA what they should do with him: the original plan had been drafted by Sardon and set in temporal stone, not to be swayed or adjusted in any way. For all she knew it was an order for execution, which at this point would be messy considering his Timeline had carried on and affected the Universes for hundreds of years.

Oblivious to her thoughts, the Doctor kept his head down, absorbed in playing. She had noticed after many long years of exposure that his choice of music as well as his ability was an approximation of his mental status. The tune was slow and winding, indicative of troubled thoughts but calmness as well. He was thinking; that was good. The Doctor was always a little less dangerous when he was thinking, as opposed to his penchant for panic and impulse—sheer anarchy let loose.

The proximity of the human's ear to the notes would have been enough to wake any Gallifreyan, but she knew little about that race. They were short-lived to a fault. It wasn't a tune she recognized. It was quite alien with its reliance on the Key of D, and it rose and fell with the sound of the simulated waves. She took in the small details of the room and wondered if its occupants hadn't missed a useful career in eco-formatting. It was a thoroughly alien environment and did nothing to persuade her to go off-planet, but all the pieces fit.

The last notes slowed, and slowed again, until they finally drifted off into the air.

Now he looked up, his hands still posed with the instrument. "Earlier than I expected, Madame Supervisor."

"We are monitoring the quadrant." She skipped the pleasantries; they both preferred it that way even if it led to the unpalatable fact that this understanding put them together more and more often. "Earth still needs work. Your future tense left behind dead Sontarans, Androgums, and humans."

"Hmn. I checked the time-stream. It was all snapped up by UNIT. _He_ gave them a call before he left the planet."

"The organization you founded?"

He sighed again. "UNIT founded itself, by, I might add, a rather determined and resourceful human."

"You were inspirational in its development. That leaves the temporal responsibility to you."

"Because they're human and I am not? We've been over this before."

He stuffed the woodwind into his cummerbund in agitation but kept his voice down, not wanting to wake the other. "Eventually the Councils will have to decide on _one_ definition for responsibility. You can't decide a people are guilty of their leaders' crimes one moment and then make the opposite ruling on another. To paraphrase a Terran proverb to Gallifreyan, 'you can't enjoy a Runberry Season without eating any'."

She wondered how the Human could sleep with such a conversation happening just inches from his head. It unsettled her that he was aging so quickly. She had seen him on the tapes at the Doctor's Trial. It wasn't even six hundred years past. Now he was grown and lines of age were sinking into his sleeping face. Her cousin's pet cobblemouse had a longer lifespan.

The Doctor caught her look, but pointedly said nothing while holding her gaze. Time Lords were good at communicating without words or even thinking. They simply demonstrated presence to get their points across.

"There will be a meeting with the Representatives of the Third Zone." She said carefully. "It is recommended that you be present, as one of the former ambassadors of peace and goodwill."

"Oh, now I'm back to being the ambassador instead of the bully. _Thank_ you." His voice could have outperformed Chronoic Acid.

"An ambassador is too often the same thing, and the Chimerans needed a show of strength." It was not her fault the plan to strong-arm Dastari had been so flawed. They simply hadn't all of the facts.

"Silly me." Sarcasm as a concept could have shriveled upon the pinpoints dancing in the Doctor's eyes. "We'll be ready when you are." A still-dark eyebrow went up as the other went down. "Shouldn't I see about getting this re-installed first?" He tapped his right forearm with his left thumb where the Exile's Cobra normally glowered. It still did, but it was currently under the skin and invisible to censoring eyes.

Madame Supervisor exhaled and locked her hands inside her sleeves. "That can wait until this horror is finished."

His gaze went tight; they both knew what she was saying: they might need him to perform as a pleasant figurehead and scapegoat.

"Horrors don't _finish_, Madame." He corrected her in a barely audible voice. "They just continue on in another form. They're like viruses in that respect."

She didn't like it when he both managed to put out a new insight, and make perfect sense. She also didn't like it when he didn't do the expected thing, which was protest the dishonesty of waiting until after the Hearing to restore the brand of his status.

_Stubborn as an Old-Blood_, she often thought in despair. _ Rassilon please do spare me from any more agents of noble blood. _

Once in a few hundred lifetimes, one encountered a scion of the older Houses that actually possessed some of his ancestors' legendary character and force of will.

"You will receive a briefing. It is expected that you conform to it."

"I'll do my best." He said dryly.

"You shall need to do more than your best."

"Hmn. Does that mean I'll be expected to wear the robes of office?"

His voice dropped just a bit, and the expression glinted in a sly way under the dark green gaze.

The Madame Supervisor knew one rule about this Parolee: _Never be predictable if you can help it._

"No." There was almost a flicker of surprise at the response. "You are a renegade, after all. To place you in your old robes of office would hardly impress the Delegates. They do know _something_ of your history."

"Good." He was still calm, but that too could be a misleading sign. "Of course it all begs the other question...if they know something of my history, they might wonder why I'm walking around with a clean arm."

"All Parolees serving us are permitted to work towards the suspension of their sentence." She reminded him tiredly.

"Suspension which I have refused because your terms are utterly ridiculous. You want to really layer on the lies, don't you?"

"Oh, you're being tiresome!" She barked, and a moment later was mortified that she had allowed him to provoke her into the loss of control.

Instead of the expected smile, or blink and drawl of protested innocence, he only shrugged and looked tired as well. "I'm merely trying to keep track of all this deceit. You change your plans frequently, you know!"

"Circumstances change, thus do our plans. Adaptation is the most expedient method by which the CIA solves its problems."

"And what a pity we aren't a telepathic race...it would make things so much simpler if I knew in advance when the Agency would change its mind..." He sighed, tilting his head up to one side. "Very well, have it your way," he said (and she wasn't certain how genuine this was; he was never fully readable). "But Zoe and Victoria did nothing wrong and you know it. None of us did."

Her head throbbed, but she wouldn't let him see it. "We merely followed procedure, Doctor, and all Agents who deviate from their orders are subject to disciplinary actions. Your protests will not shorten the period of separation."

"And yet you can't resist testing me, can you." He was almost smiling, and Gods, had she learned to dread that almost-expression on his plastic face. "Sardon only tested my loyalty to the missions; Goth tested me because he thought he saw something in me that wasn't there. But you?" He inclined his head down and forward, eyes fastened on her without blinking. "But you, Madame Supervisor...always the tests... because you believe I'll change direction on you without warning, and hare off."

"You did it before." She reminded him.

"You're very convinced I'll do it again."

_I know you'll do it again. We've seen ahead in your Timeline.._. But she couldn't tell him that, and even if she did, the Mind-Filter would block it and he wouldn't know what she was talking about. She took a deep breath. "Time will tell." She recited stonily. "You and the Piper are expected to report to the Medical Bay as soon as possible." She reminded him of standard CIA procedure, to which he exhaled and rolled his eyes upward.

"Your medicos can't tell the difference between a Human and a pre-Cyber Mondasian."

"Then give us more to work with." She allowed the bite of temper in her voice. "Your resistance to medical protocols is understandable on some level—they are unpleasant and no Time Lord is actually eager for them...but to feel this way about your companion as well..." She shook her head, finally baffled at showing emotion. "Do not give us a reason to take him from you too."

The Doctor's face changed. It was back to normal almost instantly, but under that flicker, the Madame Supervisor felt the urge to step backwards.

"Like you've taken Zoe and Victoria." He kept his face calm, but it was a mask. "_How much longer, Madame Supervisor?_ You can't keep them in 'quarantine' forever."

"They will be returned at the proper time, Doctor." She did hate referring to him by his non-CIA name but sometimes she felt she had to remind him of what he had lost. "It was not an unfair punishment; it was a fair balance for the refusal to conform to orders."

"We followed your orders to the _letter_." His eyes were changing color, shifting from his mad Lungbarrow opal to a darker, glassy shade- his protective lenses were trying to invoke in a defensive instinct for potential combat. Madame Supervisor did not know why his body was preparing for conflict up to the level of battling in vacuum, but was gratified he was holding on to control. When his left hand reached down and stroked a lock of hair out of the Piper's sleeping face, she felt justified in her suspicions: the action stilled the little renegade. His eyes calmed, lenses retracted.

Always, this argument between them. He never gave up; he never stopped. He hammered at her without ceasing, picking up the topic at each and every opportunity until she was ready to scream. "You did follow the letter. Too much so. You knew what we really wanted."

He was calm now, perfectly calm, but he would never be less than leery around her. "If you could trust me, you'd have no use for me. Your old predecessor was fond of saying that."

"It is true of all our Agents. To quote one of the Piper's proverbs, 'fighting fire with fire' is quite often effective."

"That's a Human proverb, true." The Doctor's mouth almost smiled. "But it isn't his proverb. His is quite more to the point."

"Which is?"

"Fire. It is a good servant..." One last time, his eyes flickered to chlorophyll. "But a bad master."


	3. Drydock

**Part 3. Drydock**

* * *

Summary: The Sontarans are still in Space. The Time Lords are planning. The Third Zone is about to be very unhappy. Guess who has to clean up the mess?

Characters: 2nd Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, unspecified Time Lords.

* * *

Jamie woke up feeling better than he had in...he couldn't remember. His eyes blinked open in this surprise and he turned his head. The Doctor was flat on his back on the grassy slope, sound asleep with his recorder perched in his small hands. The Piper smiled at the sight. At least when the little man was sleeping, he was resting. He hoped.

Jamie leaned back and stretched like a cat. He couldn't believe the improvement of a deep sleep.

The Doctor never moved as the Piper left the room for another washup and some more food. One grabbed what meals they could when they were living with that busy wee man. Like trying to keep up with a brownie, he was. He was pouring milk into a bowl of cooked barley when the man himself showed up with a yawn and a shuffle.

"Good timing, Jamie." The Doctor passed the table, vanished into the back, and returned with a dish of steaming flatcakes. Jamie recognized Venusian cooking when he saw it, and had no desire to steal any for himself. "I just had word from the Time Lords while you were asleep. Things are finally moving forward."

"Oh, that's good." Jamie chewed and swallowed. "Very good," he added with feeling. "Did I miss anything?"

"The rest of the dead have been cared for." The Doctor beamed and the young man almost wilted over the table in gratitude. "All we have to do is check ourselves in for another medical exam-" He chimed in with Jamie's groan of exaggerated dismay, "-and prepare for a meeting of the minds with the Third Zone Delegates."

"That's g—wait. What about the dead Androgums?"

"There are plenty of them on the Station, Jamie..."

"No, I mean, will that include the ones in the..." Jamie swallowed, "storage?"

The Doctor's tired face creased in a smile of pride, which Jamie didn't understand. "We'll make sure of it, Jamie." He reached across the table and patting the younger man's hand. "I promise."

"Thank ye for understanding." Jamie said simply. "I don't know if your people do such things..."

"Really, it depends. You don't need me to bore you with the tales of my people..." The Doctor cleared his throat awkwardly and found himself looking elsewhere. "Yes, well." He smiled and stood. "I'm going to give the TARDIS a look-over while we're waiting. I suggest you enjoy yourself doing whatever you so choose...the meeting will happen soon enough!"

"Aye, thought I'd get out the pipes and practice a bit before...the lament."

The Doctor's attempt at being pleasant ended, giving him a face to match his faded hair. "Very good, Jamie. Let me know when you're ready."

"Doctor..."

The Time Lord stopped in the midst of a hasty retreat at the smallness of his friend's voice. "Yes?"

"I... I have a question for you. When all of this is over and we can talk without-" Jamie's face flickered. "Without worryin' about getting interrupted or someone needin' our help at the last minute?"

The Doctor felt a smile bloom over his face. And Time Lords thought themselves so clever. It's easy to be clever when you already know the key to the Rosetta Stone. He wondered if any of his people had been around humans enough to know when they were conveying one of their many secret and surprisingly subtle messages.

Jamie was hinting that he needed to speak without fear of eavesdropping, and that could only mean the Zero Room.

"I'll let you know as soon as that's possible, Jamie." He promised. "But I ought to warn you, we're both going to need a visit to the Zero Room before the Zone meeting. I'm not up to my old self and neither are you, young fellow!"

Jamie's face relaxed. His hands stilled over his meal. _"Mòran taing."_ He said simply.

_"'Se do bheatha."_

"Shall we get this medical appointment over with?"

"Will they do anything that will make me lose my breakfast?"

"No, probably not this time," the Doctor tried to sound optimistic. "At least they're much better about warning us about the possibility beforehand."

"_Now_ they are."

"Patience, Jamie. Most Humans in their experience are temporal criminals, or slaves for so-called advanced races they _must_ be nice with, or deranged. The last fully Human brain in their possession was a converted cyber-skull kept artificially alive in a fluid tank!"

"Ugh!" Jamie shuddered. "Now dinnae remind me!" He rose and washed out his bowl, the Doctor following suit. "I'm gunna go find my old hiking boots. Those medical floors are a fright to walk on wi'out falling down flat."

"That's because the floors, like everything else at the CIA, are based on nothing found in Nature." The Doctor grumbled under his breath.

* * *

The TARDIS materialized in all-too-familiar surroundings. Jamie sighed and let the Doctor poke his head out first before following suit. At least they always knew _where_ they would dock at a Gallifreyan facility. Back and forth went a cluster of hurrying Gallifreyans, wrapped up in their dull and uninspiring colors. Jamie always found his humble kilt patterns brilliant as a firecrest's feathers in comparison.

Jamie had long ago realized that the CIA had the most experience with off-worlders, and their prejudices and hidebounded, high-handed dealings were a matter of choice more than anything else. Unlike some wide-eyed and limited Gallifreyans, they demonstrated tolerance for himself and the Doctor in small but significant ways: most made no comment to their offworld dress, and only a few had something derisive to say to the Doctor about his choice of body. Jamie didn't think he would ever get used to the idea that one could control their appearances from "birth" to "death" to "birth" again, and the Doctor had confessed that his current body was not one "of grand design" but one he liked very much.

* * *

_"...but it's only common sense." The stuffy old Librarian-or whatever he was; he wore the red-orange of a Prydonian which meant the Doctor was literally forced to listen to him speak at the conference for a solid thirty minutes without cease. At last Jamie had had enough; he picked up a drink from the table and silently slid into the Doctor's peripheral vision, producing the slim glass in offering._

_"Oh, thank you, Jamie." The Doctor was canny enough not to look too relieved at the interruption. "Make sure you get something for yourself. We're leaving as soon as the conference closes." He turned and looked up-and up-at his gaoler. "I beg your pardon. You were saying?"_

_"I was bidding us both farewell, until we meet again...in...**whatever** forms we wear." With a poignant look directed fully at the little Time Lord and ignored Jamie completely, the big official swept into the crowd, leaving a slightly stunned Doctor in his wake._

_"What was that all about?" Jamie sniffed. "He seemed a bit full of himself."_

_"Just a bit." The Doctor admitted. "He was one of my advisors in school." He dropped his voice and muttered, "For all that was worth."_

_"Was he digging at ye? What was that bit about whatever forms we wear?"_

_"He was telling me I could have done better with my appearance." He took a healthy drink. "I looked very different when I was younger. Much more...well...patrician. Respectable. I wasn't stuffy but I could fool people into thinking I was." He'd lowered his voice as he confided this, a wicked glint in his seachange eyes. "If you ever saw me, you'd think I was the most **boring** old Academic ever born! There were days when that bit of misdirection was all that made me smile at the end of it."_

_Jamie had no trouble believing the Doctor had always been a bit of a trickster, and said so._

_"Heh heh heh. Well **why** do what's expected?" The little man wondered almost innocently. "Of course, that seems to be normal for me", he added as if in afterthought, his still-black brows drawing together in thought. "So many Time Lords change their appearance with just their vanity in mind...when we don't even recognize each other by how we look! Bit of hypocrisy, if you ask me."_

_"So ye don't do that?"  
_

_"No...my lot appears to be a bit of...potluck."_

_"Aye, well it suits you. Jamie assured him. "Maybe that's just another lesson ye'r tryin' tae learn?"_

_"Good question. The TARDIS shaped me more than anything else; then the Time Lords will change my appearance-I won't have any say to that," a brief cloud passed across the careworn face but passed with a shrug. "It is interesting when you think of it..."_

_"Think of what?"_

_"Shush, Jamie, I'm thinking."_

Four of the scariest words in any language_, Jamie thought in amusement. Still the Doctor's eyes were lit up and sparkling little glints of blue, which meant he'd stumbled on a completely new thought. The Piper figured he was thinking to his "future lives" encountered before reuniting with Jamie, and held his tongue. Most of those "encounters" were without the knowledge (and definitely without the approval) of the CIA.  
_

_"You know, I don't know why I always leave it up to the subconscious," he confessed in a slow whisper. "Perhaps one of my younger ones have figured it out, but...you know, why expend all of that Artron? It'll go where it's needed the most, and having already lived through the onset stages of elderly memory-loss, I'm not willing to let that happen ever again!" He frowned again and absently poked at the black tooth resting in the middle of his bottom jaw. "This is what started it," he confided. "The old bat wondered why I'd let this happen." _

_"It's just a black tooth." Jamie was confused at the silliness of the thing._

_"Exactly. When I was older I'd lost half my teeth! I can't say I cared much that I had one of these go a little different-live without at least twelve of your teeth and you'll be glad to get what you have!" He shook his head. "Part of living on the run. No decent dental care. Or any kind of care to be honest. I was falling apart at the seams when I changed to this form!"_

_"Och, there's an attractive mental image." Jamie shuddered. Ben and Polly's recount of his Change from old to new had been a bit nightmarish for the Piper to adjust to. _

_"Well, it's true. Life as a fugitive with a young child to think of...there was a lot of the life to enjoy, Jamie, but there was a lot of it that wasn't too." His eyes dulled with past sorrows. "We learned to grab what fun we could. You know, that was one of the hardest lessons I think I learned. How to have fun again." His mouth twisted in a sad expression that was too complex for the Piper to translate. "I don't ever want to forget that lesson again," he added in a voice soft as thistledown._

* * *

"Oh, lovely," the Doctor said sarcastically at a kiosk liberally sprinkled with the toy-block Gallifreyan letters. He drew himself up to his full height, thumbs hooked into his dull-striped braces, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as he looked over the complicated language. Someone had added star charts, but it just looked like a mixup of data.

"What's that mean, Doctor?" Jamie asked though he already knew: The headlines were simple.

"More magnetic storms headed our way. They really need to find out what's causing them."

"I dinna fathom why people as powerful as Time Lords are so fashed up over magnetic storms." Jamie protested. "Tis a natural event, is it not?"

"Well, I suppose that's part of the problem with being a Time Lord, Jamie." The Doctor rubbed his hands absently as they hurried down the hall. "Once you've accomplished so very much with the Universes, some people forget there are always events out of our control." He shook his head, sending his tousled mop of hair flying. "I do wish they would come to that conclusion. It's remarkably liberating to not feel obligated for _everything_."

Jamie did not imagine the askance expressions from passing Gallifreyans at that comment, but he did a good job of pretending not to see them. "Oh, aye." He chimed in.

* * *

CIA medical offices had a strict no waiting policy. The Doctor and the Piper stood under the scanning beams for ID and resolutely stepped through the integrating arch, instantly T-Matting into the right area. Jamie was relieved to see a familiar face: Surgeon Darandix; a man who looked to be Jamie's own age with a lovely sense of humor. He was always curious about Jamie's time off-planet and kept the human distracted from his discomfort at being examined by a steady stream of questions. Jamie was certain it was just CIA information-culling, but he enjoyed the politeness and talking to someone besides the Doctor once in a while.

"Well it sounds as though you had a rough time of it, young man." The Surgeon commented halfway through an analysis of Jamie's blood gases. "Two weeks trapped in a rotting tomb? That would have been enough to snap a few minds."

"Ah...that wasn't the worst of it." Jamie shrugged, and kicked at a reflex test.

"Excellent. Now the other one...what was the worst of it, if I may ask? It was horrible enough."

"All that time I thought the Doctor was dead." Jamie said simply. "I'm noo stranger tae death, mind. I've seen my fair share o' it even before I met the Doctor. But the Sontarans made me think he died, screaming in pain and I couldn't do anything to stop it. His last words tae me on the Station were tae run and save myself. I dinnae want to follow orders, but I promised I would." And for two weeks, his only solid memory was that of the Doctor in that computer's giant tube.

The other's face was kindly. "You're very attached to him."

"I'd care about anyone who died like that." He said more roughly than he meant. "It's just...och. The waste of taking life! I'm a fighter, but I can't imagine killing all those innocent people just because someone thought their lives were worth less than a...a thing." He balled his fists up. "And to kill someone uncleanly? In a way tae damage the soul for the next life? That's terribly wrong, and its the sort o' wrong that spreads. Like a sickness." He shook his head. "I suppose I'll work out the nightmares one of these days."

"Now that," Darandix mused, "Is why I enjoy talking with you. Your insights are so clear and refreshing. You do cut to the bone of a matter." He straightened and wrote something lengthy on a computer screen. "Well, considering you went without proper nourishment and water for so long, surviving by your wits...you've done quite well. That Androgum device did more damage, but I see some time in the Zero Room has set the healing in progress."

"Aye. The Doctor said I might have to go back and finish up." Jamie supplied.

"I'd listen to him if I were you. He's had plenty of experience in you humans." The Surgeon wrote some more. "Make certain you keep up the eating and drinking that is normal for your race."

"Er...what's supposed to be normal?"

"Oh. Eat and drink as if you are going to live to see another day, I suppose."

"I can do that." Jamie said wryly.

"Very good. The scans on your brain are blessedly normal, with expected traumas from your ordeal falling within the safe parameters. The Zero Room will alleviate these better than anything else. I am reluctant to place you under any mental therapies considering your medical history; I might accidentally cause some damage and that's never advisable." The Time Lord clapped his hands to finish the conversation—this was a mannerism from his House of Jade background, which had startled Jamie in the first days of their getting to know each other. "When you pass back through the arch, take a detour to the Solarium. It's a better place to wait for the Doctor than the boring old limbo they call a library."

* * *

The Doctor's experience with medicine was not going as well as Jamie's. Not by half.

To begin with, the Surgeon was new. Nearly all of the Doctor's service-term had been under the medical supervision of a good friend, Ttoth. The two had worked well with each other and with great respect. Unfortunately he had been old and when Goth had finally "promoted up" and out of the Agency, Ttoth had been one of the changes in the system. Save for the rare party, they didn't see each other and it was a shame. The old fellow was ever good about prodding the Doctor out of an ugly mood, or inspiring a thought difficult to come out of his brain.

This replacement was not only not Ttoth, he was younger to a fault, mechanical, and unimaginative. He was also the sort of person who thrived on a live culture of bureaucratic minutia.

"Look, there's no point in this," The Doctor protested with increasingly sincere acting. "I was ordered to come here, be examined, and then go my merry way and out of your life until next time."

"That doesn't change the fact that we have an anomaly in your readings." The man droned with all the enthusiasm of a tone-deaf frog. "CIA Procedure are final and not open for negotiation."

The Doctor ground his teeth in a manner that could have rendered stone marbles into sand. "How am I supposed to put up with this and be on schedule?" Desperation was always a good tactic; he didn't have to fake it at all. "I was told very clearly to stick to the regime and not deviate one iota!"

"That is not your problem. I will send the report to Madame Supervisor and inform her she is to wait for your appearance until I am satisfied the anomaly is neither a threat nor in a state of growth."

"Growth? You make it sound as though I have another parasite in my brain!"

Most Gallifreyans, and for that matter, most beings, contemplate cranial parasites with a disfavorable physiological reaction. A shudder, perhaps, though the Doctor had seen more than one violent jerk of the gag reflex. Blanching was common. Horror was part of the package deal. Time Lords hated to be reminded they were vulnerable in any way.

But no, not this lad, the Doctor thought sourly as his gaoler/physician failed to react in any way whatsoever. He never looked up from writing his report.

"You do not have another parasite in your brain. This involves various pressure points throughout your body, and I must determine the cause." Scribble-scribble.

"Can you at least tell me what it looks like it is?"

"It looks like someone was taking biodata samples."

The Doctor felt his hearts lurch, and then drop to his ankles. The biodiagnostic machine, still scanning him, gave an alarming chirrup of sensors which actually made the man look up from his work, frowning at the interruption.

"You don't say." The little man said weakly.

"I do say," corrected the linguistically strangled Gallifreyan. "There is no point in saying it is until proof is produced. You asked me what it looked like; I told you. There is no proof, ergo, it is not a fact and it will not go into my report until I have satisfied myself."

Dimly over the roaring in his ears, the Doctor wondered if there was a possible way to manipulate this rockheaded old ninnyhammer of a physician. Probably not—at least not at the moment.

"Very well." Play for time...play along. He took a deep breath. "Where shall I be while I am...waiting for the report?"

"Standard non-quarantine protocols. Rejoin your team, and stay together until further notice."

"Does this mean we can return to the TARDIS?" The Doctor asked without hope.

"Standard non-quarantine protocols. Your usual address will suffice."

"Of course." The Doctor said dryly.

The Physician never looked up as he left, but as soon as his report was finally signed, he opened another program into his computer and began reading the machine's rather interesting scans of the patient at what should have been a perfectly ordinary sentence.

He was dull, unimaginative, and technical. A perfect CIA staffer and he was utterly perfect at collecting information that an emotional being would never notice. Information for its own sake was his duty and calling. And in that broad single-mindednes, the most interesting things often came to light for his superiors.

* * *

Jamie found himself hungry again, and produced the ID card that proclaimed him a working Agent for the CIA. That and a few of the toy coins Time Lords called money got him a cube and plenty of water. He was long familiar with the Solarium, and liked the view the dome gave of the sky—especially at night. A purplish cloud crawled across the starfield and a meteoroid shower speckled the blackness. For some reason meteroids were green when they burned up in Gallifrey's atmosphere, and he never tired of the sight. Against the copper of the Moon the Doctor called, "The Virgin Goddess," the sight was breathtaking. He picked his way to a deserted portion of the Solarium's Dome, where a cluster of potted red and silver trees created a small clearing. Hammocks suspended between the trees and he picked the nearest one so he could lie back with his water and just enjoy the view.

"Aren't they magnificent?" He heard a new voice at his elbow.

Jamie twisted his head up, smiling. The Doctor was standing so upright in his too-large coat his sleeves had swallowed all but his fingertips. The little man was smiling too, but there was a pain to his smile. Jamie had seen this look many times.

"Yer lookin' sad again, Doctor."

* * *

Madame Supervisor had been finishing the end of the day reports with a request for her underlings to draft a workable outline for the Third Zone Meeting—the deadline of which was rapidly coming. With a ping her comm alerted to priority mail and she glanced down at her desk, reading while the rest of the Council bickered out the small details of the meeting.

The Piper's attending medical officer had just finished detailing the young Human's condition. "As you can see, they did spend a little time in their Zero Room, but as a physician I would recommend they spend a few more sessions there." He clapped his hands once, signifying the end of his conversation and also opening up the next topic or the chance for someone else to speak.

"Thank you, Darandix." Madame Supervisor nodded. One of the senior Councilmen, who had detailed the considerable expense of replacing the Doctor's Sontaran-destroyed Stattenheim Remote Device, cleared his throat.

"Arcalian, we thank you for your attention to detail. Is the Piper still suited for work with the Doctor?"

"Completely. The two have a productive partnership and it would be wasteful to break them up."

"One moment, ladies and gentlemen," Madame pressed the protocol into her computer and the physician currently responsible for Parolee 2(*200)'s health transmatted into the T-Mat chamber. "Physician Raner, thank you for attending." She tagged his report to the rest of the Council's modems in order that they would share in the datastream; it took less than a few seconds.

"Of course, Madame Supervisor." Raner bowed from his neck. "I regret that I do not have many answers. Further tests will tell."

"So we may hope." Madame agreed. "Assuming there have been sampling taken from our Agent, is there any indication who would have committed this act of gross indecency?"

"After reading the mission statement, I must tentatively proclaim that the late Dastari would be the most likely culprit of this biotheft."

"It would not be out of order with what we know of his recent crimes." A plump Councilman pointed out. An old injury in the Hub Wars made him blink frequently when he was thinking, and he was blinking now.

"His crimes are currently too many to finalize!" The Time Lady across the table noted. "We should be exceedingly careful. Dastari's genius was unmatched. But when one mind creates a unique thought...another will follow. It is a given. And Dastari..." Her voice hesitated for the first time. "Dastari was intelligent enough to tamper with a Time Lord's physiology. We must factor in the possibility that there will be lingering after-effects."

They nodded, not happy about this situation at all.

"We have been remiss." One of the younger members muttered humbly. "It behooves us to determine the fate of these samples. Our Past with genetic experiments..."

"So noted, Colleague," Madame said quickly. "The behaviors marked for concern: would the trauma of the last mission affect these behaviors?"

Raner blinked thoughtfully. "Possible but not proven. More study would be required."

"Are there any other reasons for which P2(9*200)'s recent change in behavior can be explained?"

Rend did not hesitate. "His physical body is now the age that he was when he first Regenerated. It is inevitable there would be some blending of personality and behavior."

"An excellent possibility. What of the supervision?" Someone asked.

"All Agents are under supervision unless they have earned the privilege of privacy." Which, it went without saying, P2(9*200) had never earned and would never earn.

Someone decided to check. The wall darkened and was replaced with a live image of the Solarium under the nightly meteroid shower.

"_Ye'r lookin' sad again, Doctor..."_

* * *

"I suppose I am." The little fellow agreed distantly. He hopped up on one of the other hammocks and tucked his hands behind his head for a pillow, legs crossed at the ankles. The entire time his eyes were upward upon the bronze moon. "I have to put up with more tests before we can go back to the Chimera."

"Och, why?"

"They found traces of cellular theft on my body." The Doctor said this tightly. "Brain, bone, major organs, ligaments, tendons, neurons...even in the lungs."

Jamie blanched. "Dastari...was he experimenting on you?"

"More than likely." The Doctor's mouth set in displeasure. "Between Dastari and Chessene, they were capable of anything. Whatever was done, it was _her_ idea. He could deny her nothing. Up until this moment, I was glad I couldn't remember my weeks on the Sontaran ship. Now I'd give a lot to know what was going on."

"Do ye remember anything at all?"

"No, and with drugs, I'm not likely to. I just remember waking up with Dastari and Chessene staring over me." He shuddered. Chessene's mind had been as cold as her face. "I can still feel her trying to get inside my head."

"That's awful. Do you think she could have..?"

"No...no, no, no...she wasn't _that_ capable."

"She seemed pretty strong. And you've said Time Lords aren't the most telepathic people."

"Most of them aren't. You've seen what it puts me through."

"Aye, don't remind me." Jamie shivered.

"But telepathic skills aren't the same as...being telepathically aware. Even our youngest children have excellent defenses." The Doctor tapped his forehead sharply. "Chessene couldn't even get in through the back door. Everything was all locked up. Venusian trick."

"All's well that ends well? Or am I speaking too soon?"

"Heavens, who knows?" They stared up at the starshow for a moment.

"Worth the trip here just to see this, eh?" Jamie mused as a collision of brilliant green lights burst across the sky, from apex to Coronosphere.

"Yes and no. All the years I was running...I kept thinking there would be a time in which I could return home...but one day it all changed and I knew I couldn't ever go back. Not really."

Jamie kept his gaze on the little man. "What happened?" He asked softly.

"I changed." He said simply. "One day I just...changed. I was a tired old man...a very tired old man. My bones ached with arthritis...I was never warm. My limbs were full of rust and my memory was starting to fail. I had only one heart back then. I think. Sometimes I'm not sure...as if there were times in which I had two hearts...I suppose that's just another part of the sickness that comes with changing. One's memory is never quite the same after going through all that." He was silent for almost a minute.

"By then I was starting to realize that as long as I lived, I would keep running into problems that needed solving. I'd done quite a bit of that when I was young. Truly young, Jamie. You'd be surprised to know, there was a time in my life that I wasn't a disreputable, contemptuous renegade. I was an ambassador for Gallifrey, and also for the Time Lords, which is not always the same thing."

"Aye...so I've noticed." Some of the many insults directed at the little Time Lord at their agonizing social functions were the sort of dig-up-the-past-shames attacks.

"It was an exciting time, and I was well-respected, but you know...it was never enough. I wanted so solve problems, fix things. That's why I took the name of the Doctor. But...There were always more problems that I couldn't solve, because I had to do everything by the "proper channels." Over time I grew tired and dispirited, for lives were being lost by doing things in the "proper channels." I banned miniscopes, which was the greatest single achievement in my life; I was so proud of that," His smile was as pleased as it was wistful, "prouder than anything else I've ever done save have a family. I wanted to look upon a child and never see shame or fear for being a Time Lord in their eyes." He swallowed hard and the smile melted.

"_They broke me, Jamie."_

Jamie held his breath.

"They broke my will with nothing more than the sheer gravity of their dusty old laws and traditions...with their overweening arrogance that believed the Universe wheeled around _us_. I collapsed under that weight. I became a weary old Academic, the sort of man any self-respecting schoolboy would scorn to know and taunt behind his back. My school degrees, that I'd fought so hard to gain...weren't good enough to let me get off the planet unless I was part of a boring old techno-project. My scholastic accomplishments became less achievement and more letters. I barely passed my Academy marks and they never thought to ask why I cared so little." He sniffed in long-buried disdain.

Jamie chuckled under his breath, thinking of the evenings where the Doctor taught him to read and write—first in his own language, and then in Ben and Polly's (Zoe's version took some adjustment)...and then in his own languages. "Ye had low marks?"

"Very low. Barely made it into the club."

"Right. What were ye really doin' when ye should have been studying?"

"Are you saying I was doing something else?" The Doctor asked in affronted dignity.

"Only because I know ye."

The Doctor grinned, and dropped a hundred years off his face in the doing. "You'd be right. I wasn't studying at all."

"I knew it. So what we ye doing? Playing hooky? Scrumping the neighbor's trees?"

"Neither, you Hairy legged Highlander. I was spending all my waking hours learning other things. Things the Academy should have been teaching—our shameful past! It took me a decade just to memorize the First Era's politics!" He flipped his wrist to the sky as if accusing it of its involvement with the laziness of his school's syllabus. "I soaked up every language I could get my hands on—starting with the Old Tongue. Borrowed every dusty book I could find on the renegade peoples like the Karn...and of course there was the matter with the Pythia...I felt that it would be a good idea to know that issue inside and out in case something like that ever happened again." He shuddered and made a face.

"Nice to know." Jamie said wryly. "Sae many different kinds of trouble wi' your name on it...and I wondered why they kept sendin' ye back out for a barmpot mission."

"If it's a barmpot mission, it would be rather silly to send a perfectly sane Time Lord to fix it." The Doctor agreed in the same voice. "After school I did what they wished; I became respected...even admired. It wasn't enough. I taught myself everything I could find to take the strain off. I learned metalsmithing, crystalline structure weaving...the new physics...stellar cartography. I built computers from scratch. I dabbled in botanical genetics. Anything and everything, I soaked it up thinking it would help. It didn't help. I ceased to think for myself...and I ceased to dream. Past, present, future...it all became the same word, the same meaning. There was no going further any more than there was going back. It was all the same. Static and colourless...days bled to weeks...weeks became years. Became centuries and I was barely aware of it, just the fact that my body was ageing and my mind with it." He was silent a moment more, thinking. "Sometimes I wonder if my memory is so...spotty about the past because I did so little actual _living_ in it. It would make sense, wouldn't it?"

Jamie felt quite cold inside. "What happened to change ye, Doctor?"

"The eyes of a child, Jamie." The Doctor did not look away from his gaze of the moon. "My grandchild."

"Aye, ye mentioned her a few times. She must have been something if she was yer gran-daughter."

"Oh, she was. I'll always regret the day we parted ways, but I'll never regret I saw her grow up and become her own person..." The Doctor's voice was gaining distance as his mind, large past the Piper's comprehension, went to strange territories.

"Do ye think ye'll see her again?"

"I very much doubt it, Jamie. I don't even know if she's still alive or not...she went on to her own life. Anyway...She'd be quite ashamed to see me like this."

"Ashamed of ye? Now thot I cannae believe."

"Not ashamed in the human sense, Jamie. I fought long and hard to make sure she'd have the freedom to live her own life...and her own death when the moment came. If she saw what I've become, she would be ashamed of living her own life while mine was no longer my own."

"Ach. Ye make the point." Jamie swallowed hard. "Ye were close."

"...something I don't understand..." He caught the mutter, almost too low to be heard.

"What dinnae ye not ken?"

"I don't understand my future selves Jamie. They've got the freedom I don't have. Why are they still running?"

"I don't know, Doctor." Jamie said simply. "Maybe they don't either? Ye said ye can't remember yer past so well...what if they can't remember that part of ye?"

"That," the Doctor said at long length, "Is an explanation as good as any other...and does make a lot of sense."

"Does it really hurt to be here? Even knowing we'll be leaving on another daft mission when they want us?"

"Yes, it does, Jamie." The Doctor's voice was final. "The longer we stay here, the more it feels like I'm dying, cell by cell, forgetting how to even breathe. I love my planet; I love it madly, but it's not as if I can love it on my own terms. I'd be fighting to re-unite all our scattered elements, stop letting the divisions grow ever deeper between us. My own House would...well, one of my cousins tried to kill me over such a small matter once, I can only imagine what they'd do if I showed up on the doorstep. And the CIA will never let me do something I'd actually _like_ to do—like poke about the River, climb Mount Lung, mess about the ruins or get drunk with the Shobogans in Low Town..."

Jamie laughed out loud, glad that the Doctor was chiming in. "Och! Well that explains how ye comported yerself so skillfully that time we were in the House O' the Gimping Jack!"

"A drinking contest is hardly a feat of diplomacy, Jamie."

It is considerin' what the loser has to do!" Jamie let a few more chuckles slip out, shaking his head. "Ye were trouble, weren't ye? What else did ye do as a lad?"

"Enough to burn your tender ears, Jamie. I was nothing _but_ trouble when I was your age. By then I'd broken every bone in my body at least once, nearly killed myself more times than I'd had fingers, fell on and off the Honors Rolls, was stuck in a stampede of striped pig-bears, bitten by a Gallifreyan Cobra—twice, mind you-and my Class voted me Most Likely to Regenerate Before Marriage, much less Graduation."

"Hah! Just goes tae show." Jamie delicately refrained from asking about the remarkable woman who must have been his wife. The Doctor's face had slipped into the shadows of the night-sky, but his voice revealed his sadness. "Doctor..."

"Hmn?"

"Ye've been alone most of yer life, haven't ye?"

"Why do you say that?"

"The things you like to do...well...its what someone does when they have tae worry about...the weight of other eyes. The Laird's Nephew...he was like ye. He could only be himself when he was by himself...in the wild places where the walls were thin. He'd go right up tae the Mists, or crawl in a cairn, poke about the Wall...all the places people were afraid to visit. Because it was harder to stay around us." Jamie exhaled. "Some of the clans...they never forgave him for that...saw it as an insult. Reminds me of how yer people see ye."

"I don't see the connection."

"Well, speakin' as a Human...I've seen a lot of human-things among yer people. Good things, of course—and bad. But a truly civilized race wouldn't be seeing someone who's different as a threat _first_."

"Oh? And how should they see them?"

"They'd be..._interested_ in the differences. It's all part of the puzzle in the Grand Scheme o' Things after all, the Great Mystery. Ye need yer traditions, and yer laws and yer old ways, but that's just keepin' yer feet plain on the ground. Yer _feet_ belong on the _ground_...but your _eyes_...they should be _looking up and out_, and not starin' at yer feet tae make sure they always stay there."

"And did your people ever warm to the Laird's nephew?"

"It took 'em time, but aye. A verra long time."

"Oh? How long."

"Almost twenty years!" Jamie shuddered.

The Doctor laughed so hard he had to gasp for breath. "That's no more than a blink to a Time Lord!"

"Never understood that point o'view. Lifetimes are long or short, but the length o' them, doesn't really matter. We all get a life's time. Which is why, I daresay, ye've done more living in your two lives than any of these dry old sarks have in their thousands of years."

"Be nice, Jamie. Even dry old sarks can learn a new trick or two."

"Aye, but they'll never thank you for the learnin'." He pointed out.

"When did you pick up philosophy?"

"Hah! Me a philosopher like the Wizard Michael? I'm noo such thing. I'm a Piper. Let me tell ye, if my brain can survive memorizin' 500 lines o' poetry for every grade o'rank, there's still enough room to ask a question or two." He grinned cheerfully at the little man. The Doctor smiled back, both looking a bit conspiratorial at the magic moment when a flurry of burning meteoroids hit atmosphere and incinerated in flurry after flurry of green fire not unlike the Doctor's eyes when he was excited.

"Are we headin' back to the TARDIS or are we going back to the silliness of that room wi' yer name on it?"

"Guess."

"Och."

"Not to worry." He was told. "We'll stay till after the show first."

"Well, thot's something."

"Better than what they'll have on the screens tonight, at any rate..."

* * *

Madame slipped her gaze across the Council. The Physicians were appropriately neutral as befitted their profession, but Darandix had his "thinking hard" posture.

"Your thoughts, Darandix?"

"Madame. Merely thinking that it reaffirms my report. The Doctor should not be separated from his team."

"Dangerous." The other said coolly. "He lacks discipline as much as ever."

"His profile is clear." Darandix ignored the insult of speaking of another's patient. "He may lack discipline, but only in the conventional streams. And when he has someone to work with, he demonstrates more discipline than he would when alone." The young man shrugged. "Call it what you will. He works well with lower life forms, including Humans and that's something few of us can say. He can follow their convoluted thinking, their strange leaps of logic, and he does not try to change them. They are a dangerous species, but he can use their capacity for blind loyalty and his rapport is unmatched and can only be useful to us later."

"At best his bonding is unbalanced." Render pointed out. "The cares and concerns of an animal-tamer who is good at working with vicious beasts because he finds them less troublesome than relating to his own people."

"Still, the animal-tamer finds his niche in life. And the Doctor has found his. We may not understand the workings of his mind-he's far too Oldblood-but never once has he demonstrated malice against us. Only the determination to live in accordance to his own personal ethics. The key is controlling him in a way that allows him to conform to his ethics...or letting him believe he is."


	4. Oubliette

**Part 4: Oubliette**

* * *

Summary: The Sontarans are still in Space. The Time Lords are planning. The Third Zone is about to be very unhappy. Guess who has to clean up the mess? Completely in 6B and Parallel Time(s).

Characters: Second Doctor, 2nd Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, unspecified Time Lords.

_Note: The Oubliette Jamie and the Doctor are living in were first created by Terrance Dicks in the Season 6B book WORLD GAME. It's an interesting book, especially as how it does a decent job at solving SOME of the problems with continuity with The Three Doctors and the Five Doctors and the Two Doctors. There's enough bits and bobs in the pages for a crazy fan to come up with plenty of AU spinoffs and crossovers. Most of the other stuff like the Falconer and the Catacumbae are my own creation, because I wanted to a very Earther thing and create a bloody past for the Gallifreyan game of Sepulchasm (LUNGBARROW). It reminded me too much of Rassilon's Game not to play with it._

* * *

Jamie was tired and his feet dragged against the floor as they wound through the long, tiresome path to the rooms reserved for the Doctor on his planetside incarceration. It was late and the staff was in transition between shifts. They came to the Arch of the Oubliettes and obediently and in tandem (borne of long practice), produced their forearms. The scanners read the biochip buried under skin where the Cobra normally coiled under the Doctor's flesh, and a similar one tucked neatly inside the bone of Jamie's upper wrist. After that it was a simple matter to wait for the mechanical chirp of the Arch, pass through, and be instantly T-matted to the assigned Oubliette.

"Oh, marvelous." The Doctor stood with his hands on his hips as he looked around in disapproval.

Jamie looked around. "It hasn't changed at all, Doctor."

"My point exactly."

And he did have a point.

The Piper sighed, ignored his aching feet for the moment, and looked around again. The rooms were designed like the most luxurious of private hotels or suites: spacious, upholstered in that obsession with glittery colors Gallifreyans seemed to need, and busy. Works of art (nothing too expensive or valuable) speckled the walls. The furniture was obscenely comfortable. The floor was carpeted so thickly he doubted a walrus could be heard, if it flopped very carefully. The far wall was still lined with food and drink; the one adjacent held a museum's worth of archived reading material and music. The computers were still set, he noted, to popular channels (as well as the least popular, the one the Doctor called the 'mainstream newsworthy rubbish' and through the door ajar on the far right, the other rooms beckoned for exercise, pursuits of hobbies, or whatever one wanted.

Of all the silly things the Oubliette had, the news channels had to be the silliest. Half the time the Doctor couldn't remember what he'd just seen because of the memory filter in his head.

In the meantime, the Doctor was still grumbling. Jamie caught a few words he knew, "fatuous" being the favorite. He yawned and slumped into the nearest couch, an overstuffed thing that would have him asleep in a minute if he let it. He kicked his shoes off, one at a time, and pushed them under a table.

"You may as well just get a blanket now, Jamie." The Doctor had seen him. "You'll never make it to your bedroom from there."

"Oh, aye. I suppose I should have known what I was doing." Jamie joked feebly. "It's all a bit much, isn't it? Every time we leave, I think its all gotten blown up in my head...and then we come back and I see it's really as bad as I remember."

"I did try complaining." The Doctor scowled. "I really did."

"That must have been a good quarrel."

"Not really, no. They didn't know what I was talking about."

"Eh?"

"Oh..." The Doctor breathed out, grasping at his shreds of patience, and let it all out as he collapsed against a thick cushion. "Bother. I give up. That's probably what they want anyway."

"Aye, they want ye to give up on a lot o' things, but you always scare 'em when you actually do." Jamie rubbed his bare toes with a sigh.

"I can't seem to win for losing." The Doctor closed his eyes in defeat.

"Doctor...why all the pampering anyway? It seems like it's a reward for being a criminal."

"Oh, no. No, no, no, no...far from it, Jamie. It's just part of warped, clever, devious Time Lord psychology."

"Eh?"

"Horror stories are best told in the light of day." The Doctor was trying to make light of it, but now that they'd left the Solarium, the spell was gone. The wonder and childlike delight the little man had worn at the sight of the nocturnal lights had burned out under the harsh false lights of the Oubliette. He was again a small, shrunken-down and very weary mortal fellow.

"I can soak on it till the morrow. I'm just curious why we have everything we could ever want here, and they still call it oubliettes."

"Oh, very well." The Doctor snapped just a bit; Jamie could tell he didn't mean it. "To begin with, Oubliettes are anything but a reward."

Jamie reluctantly sat upright, his ageing spine mustering complaint. "Explain it to me, Doctor. So I understand."

The Doctor did.

* * *

Oubliettes. Traditionally a place where people were put to be forgotten. That had not changed. In the old days, a being judged worthy of oblivion was placed in a tiny cell that may or may not be large enough to lie down in. Necessary things for life and sanity—food, water, illumination, mental stimulation and companionship were unheard of luxuries. If one was very, very lucky, they would not be put into an already-occupied Oubliette. Nothing helped an already terrified mind crack open faster than the strain of sharing precious space with a rotting skeleton. Then again, many would have begged for the chance to say goodbye to their reason. So far in all these respects, the Oubliettes of Earth's dark history and Gallifrey's darker history were the same.

Things had not "improved" for Gallifrey _per se_ when the Founders came to power...Even in this period where Gallifreyans were still relatively young and raw, they were still dangerous. Some of them couldn't even be trusted to die in an oubliette in a way that wouldn't still make them a threat to others (in this Era, the last Era of Soft Time, Science and Magic ran like merrily amok children and "ghosts" and other monsters were not legend, they were fact). One of Rassilon's _many_ creative and amoral predecessors, an obscure warlord known as The Falconer, was mostly remembered by history because he had thought it worth his time to re-invent the Oubliettes into something more...worthy of note.

The Falconer's planning created the Catacumbae, setts of loosely connected, multilevel, winding subterranean chambers of anarchy and craft. Part inviolate fortress, part mental game, the Catacumbae rewarded the dangerous enemies condemned to live in these passages with luxuries if they solved progressively difficult puzzles. Least anyone think it was all about the intellect, the puzzles were based on random logic patterns and a clever convict was just as likely to find himself in a game in which physical dexterity or muscular strength would carry the game, not his brain.

It was impossible to say how many men, women, and yes—even children—lived and died in these passages.

* * *

"Gladiators' games, really." The Doctor said grimly. He had been pale before the story. Now that he was well deep inside it, he looked as though he were living it. "You remember the Coliseum in Rome."

Jamie gagged slightly. "Aye." The Doctor had barely gotten them out in time; another CIA plan gone horribly wrong because someone in the Agency had a limited understanding of Temporal mischief. In her haste to away, the TARDIS had jumped them out of the timestream by two hundred years and for many reasons, that had been the worst part of the trip: they had emerged, still dazed and shaking to find the deserted Arena full of broken stone, wild cats...

...The sands were still bloody. Hundreds of years after the games...and blood still wept from the earth.

* * *

_One of his Doctor's otherselves had been in that Arena, he remembered uncomfortably. Forced to fight for his life... it had affected the little Time Lord to step across the wisp of that one's Timeline, dissolving peacefully as the dead dissolved into the Earth. _

_"I was here once...I was **here**," he whispered to Jamie, his eyes dark in distress and he looked from side to side in that empty relic. And Jamie's flesh prickled as his mind shivered, because he knew without being told that his Doctor was watching a Past Event, one of his lives-past or present?-play events that were centuries dead across his face. The Doctor was watching ghosts that day, powerless to do anything to help himself._

_"Did it work out?" Jamie asked after what felt like an eternity as the last scrap of sun died into shadow and wild cats set up a howl. The Doctor shook himself like one of those cats, trying to come back to himself._

_"It...yes, Jamie. Yes, it did. Time flowed on...the way it was meant to..."_

_There was something else behind those words, something sad and poignant, but he turned away as he spoke to hide how he shook inside his coat. Jamie held silent. He was only just beginning to understand the concept of what the Time Lords called Da'taril, and what the Germans called Sehnsucht. Longing. Poignant longing, craving, the knowing there was a gap inside you that needed to be filled somehow._

_He understood it as a form of hiraeth; the Welsh longing for the past that could not translate at all into the English of Ben and Polly's world. Zoe had some understanding of it, as she was a linguist in love with language, but emotions confused her, and Victoria, who would have understood better than anything, wouldn't have wanted to be reminded for the world she'd been forced to leave behind._

_Thoughts of Victoria always made him sad. He struggled to return his mind to the present._

* * *

"Imagine that on Gallifrey, Jamie." The Doctor had risen and was walking back and forth, his hands fidgeting together. "Mostly underground, like the Gladiators' cells were beneath the Arena. Fighting one's way to a cell that allowed the smallest scrap of the light of day was one of the rewards, Jamie! Imagine living without seeing that? Or the sound of trees in the dawn! Gallifrey has always been a desert planet...the least change in weather is considered precious. To not see that..." The little man sank his fingers into his silvery mop of hair. "Terrible..."

And the Piper chilled at the thought. "But Doctor..it isnae _yer_ fault! How can it be? And yet ye're actin' as though it is!"

"Jamie. I'm remembering. I'm remembering for all the lives lost in the wastefulness of my people's dark past. Someone has to besides the Outsiders and Shobogans...the dusty scholars and the eccentric holy man who choose to live their lives upon the fringe." The Doctor took a deep breath and straightened; he looked even smaller in his large coat.

"Aye, ye pay vigil. I understand that." The Piper spoke quietly. In his youth he had been much more argumentative with the clever little man...and he'd been allowed that privilege. "With no one else to remember, ye do it. I understand that."

"Well...the story gets worse." The Doctor said tightly. "The Falconer made a point of observing those he put within the Catacumbae. If you stood up to him, you were made an example. He was careful to choose the dissidents with little or no sympathy...but once in a while he had someone that was popular or well-liked...and he would rig the puzzles so they would be shown in their worst possible light—forced to kill another convict, or exposing an ugly thought or past deed. The public grew addicted to this low form of entertainment. On your Earth, Jamie, even a slave could nurture some small hope of freedom if they fought hard enough...if they worked hard enough. Even if it was unreasonable, there was still a chance to hope. That never happened here! Once you were in the Catacumbae, you were there until you died! Your only easement was in gaining material comforts like something to eat...clean water to drink...a night free of filth or the fear of being killed in your sleep or eaten alive by the wild animals.

"It," the small Time Lord added, "Is the greatest crime my people have and why we will never be able to claim superiority to another's. Not that we did these things...but because we try so hard to pretend we never did."

"And yet ye remember, Doctor!" Jamie knelt down on his better leg, gripping the man's cool hands, trying to look up into those troubled green eyes. "That does not mean ye should bear all the sins o' yer world on your shoulders! Such a burden is for the Saints, and even Black Michael would tell ye this is futile." He tightened his grip. "Ye shouldna' take the burden for those who refuse the cup. _Far an taine 'n abhainn, 's ann as mò a fuaim._ 1

"Now," he cleared his throat. "Back home, 'tis the Winter Sun and time to tell the stories of the past...especially the ugly ones. What else happened? Don't stop, tell it through."

"It doesn't get better, Jamie."

"Aye, figured as much."

"The Falconer vanished out of history. Legend has it, the Other deposed him, or tricked him in his own puzzles. I suppose it doesn't matter in the grand scheme—he was gone and Rassilon took over. Rassilon by then was dealing with utter mad chaos about the planet as well as the colony worlds and the Great Vampire Invasion! He placed the planet in audit and deemed the Catacumbae an abomination. Unfortunately for him, the Catacumbae Games, which were the privileged amusement of the wealthy and powerful, had spread to the surface world and the entire public of Gallifrey was entertaining themselves with the Death Zone—gladatorial battles to the death in a specific area on Gallifrey.

"Which," the Doctor added almost inaudibly, "was within eyesight of my home, if you climbed to the cusp of Mt. Loom and put your back to the Small Sun as it rose from the South."

"Keep going." Jamie urged.

"The Death Zone...he couldn't ban the Death Zone _et al_, but he could seal it off. Impossible to say how long it took the last Gallifreyans to die in that horrible place. It...It wasn't like the rest of Gallifrey, Jamie. It's accessible at our Polar Point. The Coldest, dampest part of the world. You'd like it without the monsters! It's misty and grey, and the old Quartz Quarries are still there, large caves and fogs and fields of _green_ grasses you'll never see anywhere else.

"You mentioned playing the Game of Rassilon," Jamie pointed out. "I remember that well enough."

"It's a horrid story, isn't it? In the end, Rassilon was deposed by those who rebelled against his rule, but by then it was too late to unwind the clock. The Games were stopped and the Catacumbae were put to rest. The need for the games lives on in the game Sepulchasm—which you've seen some of my people playing."

"Oh, aye that I have." Jamie nodded. It was a bit bloodthirsty for his tastes, with a model of the planet, model actual houses, and a game-board that opened into a bottomless pit when the right number was rolled. The player who could telekinetically keep his pieces suspended over the chasm without falling was the winner. All that just to win something—Jamie felt it would never replace a good round of quoits.

"Rassilon went to rest in his tomb and anyone who wanted to learn his secret of Immortality had to fight...and win the Game that was trapped within the Death Zone." The little man trembled at the thought. "And here I thought that would be the end of it." He said under his breath.

"What do you mean, Doctor?" Jamie's flesh prickled.

"Nothing, Jamie...at least I hope it is nothing." The Doctor smiled as he pressed his hands around Jamie's left.

"What is it ye're not telling me?" Jamie murmured.

"I...Jamie...I don't know how to explain it."

"Can ye at least try?"

The little man closed his green eyes for a minute, breathing deep. "I can try." He opened his eyes, looked down at the Piper with the old, familiar and kindly expression, squeezed his hands against Jamie's one, and began to talk.

Jamie heard the sounds but not the content. The Doctor was only talking with his mouth on the surface; on the inside, he was speaking with his mind against Jamie's. He didn't want the Time Lords to overhear this particular conversation.

_There were rumours, Jamie, that Rassilon had influenced the Falconer's puzzles. That his Game that gave the winner immortality was just a ruse within a ruse; those who gained the secret of Eternal Life were rendered statues, but there was something more terrible waiting them...something lost to Time and hidden. I sometimes wonder...if Rassilon had devised a trap within a trap...to not only separate the most dangerous of our people from the ability to cause harm...but also to draw them close and keep them in his power. To create a secret army of brilliant minds and wills to do his bidding when he deemed it necessary. It's a terrible thought, isn't it? And I'm not certain I want to know. But that question is there, and I don't want that question answered."_

The conversation, both mental and physical, had ended. Jamie floundered for something to say when he hadn't listened to a single word coming out of the Doctor's mouth, just his mind. He finally smiled and rose to his feet.

"I have but one thing to ask ye. And that is, do ye feel better for the talking?"

Somewhat." The Doctor almost smiled as he looked up.

"So...do I understand ye when I believe that ye were telling me that the...ah...comforts..." He waved his hand vaguely about the ridiculousness of the rooms, "are rooted in the puzzles o' the past?"

"You are not wrong." The Doctor told him. "The Oubliettes were designed to forget people. Time Lords...their justice moves...slowly, Jamie. It has been known that condemned criminals have lived out their entire lifespans in these very rooms, dying even as they waited to know if they would be pardoned or executed. And to that end, the Oubliettes have every conceivable creature comfort. It sounds compassionate, doesn't it, to place someone in a chamber where everything they could ever want is provided for...everything at all... but in reality, it's just the balming of their conscience. It lets them put these people aside so they don't have to think of them anymore. Years will easily go by; centuries even. Criminals will see one life pass, perhaps two. Or all of their lives pass. And who will ever see them?" He shook his head. "Time Lords know full well that if a person is a renegade, creature comforts will not be enough. They are renegades because they looked past the nice, safe life of a respectable person. They will crave what they do not have, Jamie. It can take a few years; it can take a few centuries. But it will happen, this subtle and terrible punishment."

Jamie was quite pale and sick by the time the Doctor finished talking. Jamie couldn't hope to live as long as a Time Lord. He could die in this room for any number of reasons, and leave the Doctor alone with his corpse...and their gaolers would never concern themselves until it was time to call them. "Then," he said simply, "Ye are worried that every time we come here, it will be our last."

"I do worry that. I do worry it indeed." The little man's gentle face was furrowed with compassion and pain for his friend.

Jamie took a deep breath. "Doctor...come what may...and come what may...I do not regret this moment, nor do I think, the moment of the day that will follow. I love the moon of Earth, Doctor...but I willna be the food of the moon."

The little man tipped his head to one side, his weary-worn face clouding in momentary confusion. "I don't understand what that means, Jamie. How can a moon eat you?"

"Ah, call it my primitive beliefs, eh? I'll explain it to ye if we ever go back to Earth...Works better with the demonstratin'..." He was too old to grin with the boisterousness of his past, but he could openly smile at the Doctor, and that he did. "Sometimes, I worry that ye forget I'm just a human, Doctor. I'll be dust long before you shake this coil."

"Jamie!" The Doctor's face bloomed into the purple of a storm cloud. "Stop talking like that!" His small hands were strong and they sank deeply into the Piper's flesh through the cloth sleeves.

"Doctor..." Jamie kept his voice calm. In his age—and his separation from the Doctor—he had learned the wisdom that had been brewing beneath the surface of his soul as he journeyed with the Doctor. "We are both under Michael. Time tae the Scots isnae what the English have it. It doesn't flow in one direction like a river that never sees the flood. Ye have the Time of the Serpent, and I have the Time o' the Grimmonds, for I was not the first-born son. I was the last-born and the right of the Grimmonds my mother, and that clan always said, "Leave the rest to the Gods." He re-gripped the cool hands that escaped the swallowing of the sleeves. "Ye have the wisdom of the Serpent...and I have the wisdom of the juniper."

The old face, really, too old, searched his and Jamie could almost imagine the thoughts trying to escape that clever tongue. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by that, Jamie. I've studied your world...I've lived within it for most of my life and explored it...but I don't know what a juniper's wisdom is."

"Ah, ye will. Ye're a clever wee chappie."

"Jamie!" He scoffed at the old endearment.

"I mean it, Doctor." Jamie stood firm in this. "It's cheatin' t'give away the puzzle. I can explain it to ye once you're quite sure ye haven't riddled it out, hey? But you've got all the time in the world to figure it out."

"You're just trying to take my mind off tomorrow, aren't you?"

"What better way then to give ye a puzzle?" Jamie stood, though every bone ached. "And I'm sorry, but I'll be going through the pipes a few times to make sure I have the lament doon. Do ye wish to be the critical audience, or do ye wish to bow out with a pillow tied about yer ears."

The little man managed an expression impossible for most humans: his eyes rolled up as his mouth-ends went straight down. "Jamie for goodness' sake." He scolded lightly. "Which lament will it be?"

"Thought I'd give the Banshee's lament." Jamie said simply. "Because no matter what, this willnae be settled until it's solved. And that means I'll we'll noo go home till then, aye?"

The green eyes dulled to the shade of rainy copper. "Jamie..." He breathed. "That lament gives you nightmares."

"So it does. I'd rather it be nightmares o'my own choosing and not that of another's."

"Then...I'll stay with you and listen."

"Thank ye, Doctor." Jamie's face stretched into a cheerfulness rare and poignant in his age, and he paused long enough to pass a leery eye to the rooms before he went to the wooden chest at the foot of a bed in the corner. For a moment he simply held its contents in his arms, stroking the tartan-wrapped skin gently.

And then he began to play.

* * *

1 _Where the stream is shallowest, it is the noisiest_


	5. Cold Thoughts for Cold Minds

**5: Cold Thoughts for Cold Minds**

A very vivid flashback with Ben and Polly here...those two were so much fun!

Characters: Second Doctor, 2nd Doctor, Ben Jackson, Polly Wright, Jamie McCrimmon, unspecified Time Lords. the Droge of Gabrielides

* * *

Jamie slept with only a few nightmares. Was this an improvement? Or were the horrors of the past simply waiting? He wasn't sure. Just doing something about the past always helped, but re-living memories of stacking frozen corpses...and finding the Androgum freezer...

The Piper felt he had slept enough. He rose and soaked in the overlarge tub, decided to let his hair go back to its original length, and picked over the clothing until he found something suitable to wear for the upcoming Meeting. The kilt, he scowled, was going to be a problem.

There were no windows in the oubliette. If they wanted to "see out" they had to command one of the computer screens to give them a view—and there was no way of knowing if it was a false image or that of something really happening. Jamie felt like a toy inside a doll's house, and he was certain the Doctor felt the same.

Speaking of the Doctor...

The Piper moved quietly in his bare feet, staying close to the Doctor's room. They both left their doors open, not willing to give up the chance to communicate quickly. He poked his head partway in and took in the fact that again, the Doctor was sound asleep fully dressed on top of the bed. Again, his recorder was clutched in his hand and also, a thick little book with a black cover and writing: his 500-year diary (which had long passed the 500-year mark).

Jamie didn't like what he was seeing. He had lived through fights before Culloden, and he had certainly seen his share of combat on the TARDIS. The Doctor had always given them the chance to rest and recover, but Jamie couldn't recall seeing the Doctor living like this: He was acting as though he expected to be yanked into trouble without a second's notice. A man undresses or gets comfortable for sleep if he expects to be given rest. The Doctor was ready for war and he didn't want to involve Jamie.

That hurt, actually. It felt like an abuse of trust. But Jamie was smarter with age and with being around the Doctor for so long. He knew this could just be part of the little man's struggles with returning to reality. He may have been out of his head for two weeks as the Sontaran's prisoner, but he was still a prisoner. Jamie knew Time Lords had odd little tricks with their memory, and the Doctor often heard entire conversations go on even when he was sound asleep.

Jamie had faith the Doctor would remember the missing two weeks on that Sontaran ship. Hadn't he been through this before?

At Zoe's Wheel he had been wobbly from a concussion on the head, and unable to recall what he'd seen that had scared him badly enough to stagger out of his bed and try hand-to-hand combat with a murderous robot. At the time, Jamie didn't know the Doctor had seen something that made him think, "Cybermen," but he had asked him: "_You honestly can't remember?"_

"_No, but it's there. It's there in the back of my mind."_

Jamie believed the past was still there in the back of the Doctor's mind. He knew that recovered memory would be nothing but pain, but that would be a real pain, not the helpless hurting that came from a missing hand or foot, which was how the little fellow felt when something was wrong with his mind.

As Jamie was thinking, the Doctor muttered something thick and distressed in his sleep. A moment later his entire body jerked and his eyes snapped open, fingers going tight on his diary and recorder.

"Ay," Jamie said softly. "Did I wake ye?"

The Doctor needed a moment to get his bearings. "No...I don't think so..." He mumbled, and sat up clumsily, as if he'd forgotten how to quite use his limbs. "Oh." He breathed out. "These beds are ridiculously soft. Next time, I'm sleeping on the floor."

"Aye, that's what I had tae do."

"Right." The Doctor rubbed at his face, tucked his things back into his coat, and went through the motions of putting together a plain breakfast that would have been scorned by an Androgum. Jamie hoped that was a good sign; under the Androgum DNA he had been a glutton—wholly unlike himself, a man who ate anything and everything for the gratification. The Doctor Jamie loved also ate anything and everything, but not to be a glutton; he ate with a polite efficiency even if the food was truly awful. He didn't complain even if Jamie did, and sometimes that ashamed the Piper. Maybe it was just a sign that he was more mature?

Jamie some sort of Gallifreyan bush-berry that reminded him of sweet apples. He unobtrusively watched the Doctor as he ate, looking for any signs of the untoward. So far, so good. The little man focused on what he was doing, like he always did when he had nothing on his mind when he ate. And he ate as usual—no wild enthusiasm or craving for seconds, no gorging or discussing the food. Jamie calculated the few days that had passed since the DNA injection. He was avoiding meat but so was Jamie—and that was to be expected after dealing with Androgums...not to mention their work in cleaning up Chimera.

"Watch the tea; it's hot." The Doctor warned even as he filled a cup to the brim. Tea was a drink Jamie had resisted with an indecent enthusiasm thanks to his association with Redcoats, but the Doctor had found a common ground for them in the tisanes. This one was red and tasted of tart hawthorne. A drop of the stuff the Doctor called Gallifreyan Honey made it perfect.

The Piper's fears gradually relaxed. As far as eating went, the Doctor was acting normal again. It was much more like him to just eat to get through the day. When he wasn't it was because they were on one of their adventures. When that was going on...the funny little man was the _least_ predictable eater he had ever known.

For that matter, the least predictable eater Ben, Polly, and Jamie had known too. They often talked about it, puzzled at how eating seemed to be an _act_ with him, just like his clown's clothing or messy hair and pretense at being stupid when he was usually the smartest man in the room: Food was a means to an end. None of them could believe he actually _liked_ Zaroff's horrid seaweed back in Atlantis, but Polly conceded that stranger things had happened.

"_Aye, and those stranger things are usually Doctor-related too," Ben had noted. He ran his finger around the high collar at his throat and tugged down the dark blue sleeves of his wrists, rolling his shoulders under the fancy cut of cloth. Jamie thought he looked like an Admiral._

"_Don't be mean, Ben."_

"_I'm not. Yew never know with that little vandal." Ben's favorite term for the Doctor had been birthed from the unforgettable sight of watching the little fellow slap together a Dalek Disruptor Box in their cell. "Completely out of his tree, he was," the Cockney assured Jamie. "Ripping things out of the wall and even the bedsprings. And yew know, I think he was having a right old time doing it."_

"_You were having just as much fun watching him, Ben." Polly chided with a smile. Dressed in Festival silks, she was easily the prettiest lady in a room full of ladies, but for Ben she was the only lady._

"_It's not every day a fella gets to see someone else do that. Made me think of me happy old childhood by the Brewery."_

"_Your childhood must have been the despair of the local Bobbies."_

"_Now, Duchess, the fine fellows knew me by name."_

"_Why am I not surprised?"_

_The three humans were bantering away, but their eyes were never far from their view of the dance floor below the balcony. In a bewildering display of costumes representing various planets across the Galaxy, at least one certain fellow was easy to track. _

"_He's still at it." Ben noted._

"_Aye, whatever "it" is." Jamie mused._

"_Something to do with food." Polly shrugged._

"_'E acts like he's just checkin' it all out." The Cockney shrugged as well. "Ey, maybe he's grabbing recipes?"_

"_Why would he do that?" Polly was startled._

"_Well, he's trying everything they're giving him, but no more, right?"_

"_He's impersonating one of the Protocol Officers, Ben. I don't think they're supposed to do more than that."_

"_Na, that ain't it. Ain't yew ever been to a wine-tasting?" Blank looks met his question. The little Cockney sighed, forced to be patient with lesser minds. "Look. Jamie, as a right Scotsman, you know a good drop o' Scotch when ye get it, right?"_

"_Course I do!" Jamie exclaimed indignantly._

"_Well, think about it. If yer in a new place, and ye don't know everybody, how do ye know if they're givin' ye what they say is the best scotch in the house?"_

"_Take three sips." Jamie answered without pause._

"_I'm still in the dark, you too!" Polly exclaimed. "What does three sips have to do with good scotch?"_

"_If there's been a hard year or the good drops have been all drunk up, they have to mix it all together." Jamie told her. "Ye take one sip, and that gives ye the first flavour. Ye take a second sip a moment later, and that'll give ye the next flavor hidin' behind the first."_

"_And the third sip for the third...so you can tell if the malt's been blended as opposed to just mixed all up? Oh, that's a good trick!" Polly mused. "Wait a moment...is that why my father always served his scotch in such tiny little glasses when we had company?" Her father drank socially; her mother's Temperance ran the rest of the household with iron fists and claws.  
_

"_Could be, Duchess. And after a meal too, I bet?" At her nod he grinned proudly. "Yer father's a sharp one, that is."_

"_Well surely he's not trying to see-" Polly blinked as she "got it." "Oh!" She breathed. "He's analyzing the ingredients, isn't he?"_

"_Can't fool you, Duchess." Ben smirked proudly, his arms folded across his rock-hard chest. He was the smallest of them, but Jamie knew for a fact that a tussle with the sailor was like fighting a boulder. A slippery one._

"_I'm so stupid." Polly scolded herself, her hands on her face. "My own Aunt would do the same thing! No recipe from any of her rivals was safe! She'd eat it up, praise the cook, then go home and duplicate the recipe for her own cook!"_

"_Stupid? You?" Ben scoffed, beating Jamie to the protest by a hair. "Yer the one who can see right threw the Doctor while we're still scratchin' our scalps. You just got more in your head than we do, Duchess."_

"_Ben Jackson," Polly scolded._

"_Whssht." Jamie hissed. "I think he found something."_

"_What?" The other two crowded back to the rail._

"_He just dropped a handful of those little blue sweeties into the fishpool."_

"_I hope that doesn't mean the fish are going to start turning into brainwashed Cyberslaves or something!"_

"_Don't be silly, Duchess. They're __fish__. They'd turn into brainwashed Cybermats or something."_

"_I've about had enough of you..."_

_Jamie listened to them bicker, watching how the Doctor was cheerfully accepting a large amount of the blue treats by the Droge of Gabrielides. "Look at that," he hissed. "The big bald Droge chappie...he's determined to gi' the Doctor more o' those things."_

"_Didn't he say his planets were expanding their treaties past their original Galactic borders?" Polly muttered as they hung close. _

"_Now, how is he going tae get out o' that?" Jamie fretted. The much-bigger man was clearly expecting the Doctor to do more than praise his gift. He expected him to eat it as well._

"_Oh, dear." Polly said._

_The Doctor continued to chat pleasantly, his hands in all directions as he demonstrated some part of his story. The Droge was politely listening, but impatience was gelling over his florid face—and suspicion._

_Then to the horror of his Companions, the Doctor merrily underscored his story by popping a handful of the treats into his mouth._

"_But-!" Ben sputtered. "Oh, lummy us! I guess he couldn't hold 'im off any longer!"_

"_What are we going to do?" Polly exclaimed. "If those things are what's been turning everyone into slaves..."_

"_We have tae get him out of there!" Jamie was already halfway down the steps, moving with as much speed as the urgency of the situation could allow and still not attract undue attention at the Ball. Ben and Polly followed as best as they could in their fancy dress clothes._

_The three got to the Doctor at the same time; the Droge was beaming with all three of his eyes winking in their rolls of fat, and his unpleasantly sharp teeth winked too._

"_Oh, dear, is it getting warm in here?" The Doctor was saying as he wiped at his neck with his kerchief. A sheen of sweat gleamed at his brow and he was taking deep breaths._

"_I expect it is, my good fellow." The Droge was assuring him. "But surely no more than a trip of the internal climate controls. All should be back to...normal...before long."_

"_Excuse me, please!" Polly took the initiative. She bowed to the Droge before turning to the Doctor. "I'm so sorry to interrupt you, sir. But we've received an urgent call from the Homeworld. They're wanting to know if you've managed to find the President's Cousin yet."_

"_I've barely started to look for that boy!" The Doctor exclaimed indignantly before whirling to the much-larger being. "I'm so terribly sorry, Your Droge. We were having such a pleasant conversation too."_

"_Think nothing of it." The Droge grinned with his teeth. All of them. "My party and I shall see you at the Dance later, I trust?"_

"_Oh, I wouldn't dream of bowing out." The Doctor bowed out of the conversation and the four of them left under pretense of business._

"_Puffed up old walrus," the Doctor growled under his breath. "Now look here, what's-" He yelped as three sets of hands promptly yanked him down the hallway and stuffed him into their allotted suite. "What are you-What is going on!" He demanded as Jamie wrestled his arms behind his back in a pinning mode that was the grievance of all Redcoats. "Jamie!"_

"_Sorry, Doctor. You'll thank us for this later! It's for yer own guide!" Jamie found himself suddenly struggling to re-establish his grip on the Doctor, who was doing an abrupt and decent imitation of an angry eel._

"_Don't worry, Doctor, we''ll get that poison out of you!" Polly, in full lionness mode, roared. "Ben, get the salt water!"_

"_Got it, Duchess!" Ben stuffed a glass of steaming, salt-clouded water into the Doctor's hands. "Here ye go, Doc! Down the hatch!"_

"_Down the hatch what?" The Doctor stared at them, from one to the other, as if they had gone mindless. "What are you on about? Why would I want to drink warm salt water?"_

"_To get rid of whatever it was that horrible man made you eat!" Polly half-shrieked. _

"_It's too late, Duchess! He's already gone! Let's just-"_  
_  
"We saw it! It's what he's using to drug the people, isn't it?"_

"_Just wait a moment—Jamie, don't you dare!" The Doctor roared himself, and forcibly pulled away from the Companions inches before he could be thrown to the floor, sat on, and forced to drink the vile brew. "I didn't eat it at all! I palmed it into my sleeves!" He shot his cuffs and held out his hands for proof; the brilliant blue cubes rested in his palms. "See?" He demanded anxiously. _

"_But we saw ye eat something!" Jamie protested. _

"_Yes! Jelly babies! I just switched them out of my palm!"_

"_Oh, thank goodness..." _

_All three humans adopted various stages of limp relief. Ben folded up until he was sitting on the floor. Polly sank into his lap. Jamie whistled out his last breath and sat on the table. The Doctor was still staring at them as if he didn't quite trust them not to try their original plan. He gave the salt water still steaming in Ben's hand an unfriendly look._

"_Wait a minute!" Polly shrieked, making all the men present jump half out of their skins. "You were sweating! And complaining of the heat! Just like the first victims did before their minds turned into porridge!" She leveled a lacquered talon straight at the little man. "How do you explain that?"_

"_What? Oh! This!" The Doctor hastily pulled out his handkerchief. "It's wet! I dipped it in the fishpool when I threw the poisoned bits in, and I used it to wipe my face—left a sheen! Simple!"_

"_Cor, what a relief!" Ben blew out. "I wasn't lookin' forward t'making ye flash yer hash, Doc."_

"_That makes two of us." The Doctor dropped the rest of the poisoned treats to the table with a scowl. "My word, this is a nasty bit of work," he observed. "The toxin is a derivitive of Rigellian Ergot; only humanoids would be affected. The rest of the delegates wouldn't get so much as a hiccup." A moment later he blinked up at the three of them, realizing they were still dazed with a mixture of relief and remembered horror. "I'm sorry to frighten you like that," he apologized sincerely. "It wasn't my intention..." His mobile face changed without warning, to deep creases of worry. "Really, I wouldn't trick you like that unless I had a choice."_

_That was true, but Jamie's clear-cut soul shriveled at any falsehood. The Doctor's ability to dissemble was frightening at times because he was just so __good__ at it. That skill was, in the Piper's experience, the realm of the deceptive, the devious, and the untrustworthy. To see this trait in someone he deeply admired was shocking and he frequently struggled with himself to reconcile this gap._

"_I suppose we should be the sorry ones, Doctor." Polly wiped the back of her neck. "It's...we could have trusted you. You were the first one to see something was wrong with the food to begin with."_

"_It's all right, I really wanted to get out of there. What an ugly man!" The Doctor was not referring to the Droge's lack of physical beauty. "Enslaving people for material gain!"_

"_He'll rue the day we came along." Ben grumbled, folding his arms over his chest again._

"_Hmn." The Doctor's face was still troubled. "Ruing will have to wait until after the Dance, I'm afraid. But I assure you...it will be worth the wait." He picked up one of the cubes and sniffed it with a scowl. "Ben, Polly, can you carry your facade a bit longer?"_

"_Of course we can, Doctor." Ben hooked his arm around Polly's and beamed up at her in a fairly sappy way. "Right, my lovely little flower?"_

"_But of course, my treasure."_

"_Ghah." Said Jamie._

_The Doctor smiled softly at the act, but there was a sudden sadness in it. "Return to the Floor, and complain a bit about how working with me means you never get time alone. Throw in a few choice words about how you devoutly hope that my new valet can manage his duties. If anyone asks—and you know who will—I plan to be back on the Floor as soon as I've soothed the fears of the Home World."_

"_Easy 'naff." Ben grinned from ear to ear, and with a surprised squeak from Polly, swept her into a fast-motion waltz and out the door._

"_Young people." The Doctor said to the much-emptier room._

_"Aye, they're cracked for each other." Jamie agreed, shaking his head with the worldly disdain of a boy who hasn't the time to notice girls. Then he caught the look on the Doctor's face. It hadn't changed since it had gone soft and smiling and sad. "Doctor?"_

"_Hmn? Oh." With deep reluctance, he shook himself. "I'm sorry, I was...a million miles away."_

_Jamie gave him a shrewd look. All the Doctor's past comments, sniffs, digs and protests about dancing was suddenly clear. "Ye dinnae worry, Doctor. I'm sure there'll be a pretty lass glad enou' to dance with ye tonight."_

"_Eh? What?" The little man's face swamped over in confusion. Jamie literally saw him roll back their conversation like a ball of twine, and roll it across his mind again. "Oh." He said as the confusion cleared. "Oh, dear, Jamie. That's not it." He shook his head, sending his mop flying. "I wasn't thinking that at all." But the sadness was creeping back._

"_Och, I'm sorry, Doctor." Jamie apologized. "If I was out of place..."_

"_Not at all." The Doctor squeezed his shoulder. "I'm not worried about dancing with anyone, Jamie. I...don't really dance any more." His gaze dropped to the floor and he found something interesting to do with his hands._

"_Because yer reason for dancing isn't here?" Jamie whispered._

"_Exactly right." The Doctor whispered back. He was still staring at his hands. "She'd point out that I'm still _ridiculously_ young-I was a little younger than her and she never let me forget it-with a long, long life ahead of me, and she'd call me foolish, and scold me, and she'd tell me to stop holding myself back...but she was the only one I ever wanted to dance with." He looked as though he regretted saying so much, and breathed deep, snapping his spine in place. "Well, it's all just an act anyway," he said in a brighter tone. "And that I can do. It's not the first time I've had to function as an ambassador." He struggled through a smile. "The way Ben and Polly were teasing each other just now...it just reminded me of...myself...the past and I hadn't expected it."_

"_Ach, they can be a handful, can't they?" Jamie chuckled._

"_Look who's talking." The Doctor laughed back. "Now, let's see if we can't get started on some deception of our own. Jamie...let's see how well we can turn me into a mindless puppet."_

* * *

"Jamie? You are a million miles away."

The Piper shook himself, amused at the way the present could bleed into the past. "I was just thinking, Doctor." He smiled.

"A pleasant memory, I hope."

"Aye, it was." Jamie said softly. "Ben an' Polly. The three of us, worrying aboot ye as usual."

The Doctor gave him a fond glare of exasperation. "Between the three of you, it's a wonder I could breathe, I was so coddled!"

"Ach, that's what humans do wi' family, Doctor. And like it or not, ye've thrown in yer lot with Humans."

"Yes, well..." The Doctor cleared his throat and stared down into his tea, pleased and confused and completely uncomfortable with being, as Ben had once said, "included into a club that actually wants him."

Because the Time Lords would never give love and affection to a clever wee chappie who deserved that love more than any one of their people. For all the Doctor had done for them, he had never once asked for thanks or praise even though he had been generous with it to others. Quietly overcome, Jamie gripped the small, strong shoulder under his hand. "Should I ever get the chance tae see them again, ye can expect us to stay up all night, chewing the fat and talking about the past wi' ye."

"Chewing the fat?" The Doctor passed on an expression of truly impressive scorn upon the young man. He began fiddling about with his bow tie—instead of going about his neck, he fastened it with a pin and used it instead of a collar button on his shirt. "You can leave me out of it. I'll just go do something else. Like...take up gardening or macrame!"

"Och, if it's around Polly, ye'd best be careful in her garden. Some of the plants she was growin' in the TARDIS were a bit queer."

The Doctor actually laughed out loud. "I think I still have a few of them in the herbarium," he mused when he finally got his breath. He was still smiling as a sudden coldness dropped into the room—and with it dropped the laughter in his eyes.

Not coldness, Jamie realized. It was the chill of a mind, the same one that had communicated with him so silently in the TARDIS after they left the Doctor's future self in Spain. The Piper took a risk and kept his hand on the small man, kept his mind still and quiet.

"Oh...oh, _bother_..!"

The Doctor's head bowed, streaming eyes clenching shut as his teeth gnashed in a forming mental headache. Jamie swallowed his anger at this form of communication. It wasn't worth it, surely? Not for what it did to him?

The Doctor slowly pressed his fingertips into his forehead and temples, still tight in distress. A tremor passed through his body.

_Cold_, Jamie thought. _Cold thoughts for cold minds._ Minds so cold, he rarely even felt their attention. He was small and unpleasant; a bug to their largeness and easily ignored. Thank goodness.


	6. A Friend's Eye

**6: A Friend's Eye is a Good Looking-Glass**

Summary: The Sontarans are still in Space. The Time Lords are planning. The Third Zone is about to be very unhappy. Guess who has to clean up the mess?

Characters: Second Doctor, 2nd Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, unspecified Time Lords. Cameo by Ben and Polly

* * *

"There's been...a slight change in Their plans." The Doctor said at last. The coldness had finally left the room, but Jamie felt the ice still within him. So too did the Doctor, who couldn't keep the shake out of his voice. "The Third Zone found out a bit ahead of their projected schedule. There will be a conference. We're expected."

"Och."

The Doctor refused to respond to the telepathic summons until he was completely under control. Jamie didn't think that meant the "wash my face first" sort of control. It was more along the lines of "If I wash up and change clothes maybe I'll feel less prone to doing something all of Gallifrey will regret later" sort of control.

"Just worry about the scrubbin' part." Jamie told him. "I'll find ye something decent to wear...well, decent enough for thot crowd o' trick horses."

"No kilts, Jamie." The Doctor warned him out of long practice.

"Ye look fine in a kilt!"

"No kilts _today_." The little man amended. Instead of shouting his indignation, he was absent; his mind wasn't in their familiar game of snip and snap and snarl. He ripped his tie off, which was also his collar button.

"Hmn..." Jamie put his hands on his hips, surveyed the Doctor's room, and pondered as the sounds of a water-shower went on. Unlike most Gallifreyans, the Doctor didn't mind getting wet at all—welcomed it even. Humming on a rather awful modern tune that involved too many high notes, the Piper rummaged about, gave up, thought hard with a slow-dawning glint of what might be mischief in his blue eyes.

* * *

It was a moment's work to talk to the computer and get what he wanted. The daft machine was a daft machine after all, and wouldn't argue.

The old and overlarge frock coat was easy to fix; it just needed a good cleaning. No amount of cleaning would stop it from looking like a battered old thing, because that was what it was. The Doctor loved it like an old friend and had stopped wearing it around the Time Lords recently. Jamie didn't approve.

The shirt was a different story. The dull beige and grey the Doctor had been wearing of late didn't suit him at all. It demeaned him in a way, washing out the remaining colors in his eyes until they were as dull as the rest of the Time Lords. Jamie tossed the selection into the bin and defiantly paged up a light blue shirt, the kind with short, wide sleeves that he used to wear back in the old days. It was as loose as his coat, and gave him the freedom of movement he needed. The tie had changed too—Jamie found an older one hiding in the back, a larger one a deep blue with small lighter blue dots. The red silk handkerchief with the yellow sunbursts was a surprise: he'd thought it long lost.

Time to get rid of those dull, washed-out braces. Jamie simply hunted until he found the old red ones with yellow symbols. The clips were still in good shape...

When he was finished, he smirked at his work. Perfect. Just perfect. Tonight the Time Lords were going to have their hands full. And they deserved it.

He thought of Ben and Polly. If they were here, they would approve. So would Victoria, of course, once she understood what was happening...and Zoe would be helping him in this mischief with a chirrupy grin on her tiny face.

But Ben and Polly would especially appreciate this...they had been the first ones to help him understand the Doctor as a wanderer and fugitive...and it had all started with clothes.

* * *

_"He'll be all right, Jamie. Don't fret so."_

_"I cannae help it." Jamie confessed. He had gotten over the strangeness of the cool hand inside his...a hand that never seemed to warm no matter how long he held it. He stared down at the sleeping face. Still and quiet with his snapping eyes shut and his black hair askew over the pillow, he looked smaller than ever, a Changeling under the blankets. The slow rise and fall of his chest was the only show of life._

_"Yer blamin' yerself, Mate." Ben's usual smug banter was gone as he came up behind the Piper. A large mug of tea rested in his hands, steaming off the boil. Jamie couldn't bring himself to silence stretched long and thin as the three stared down at the fourth from various positions in the Medical Bay._

_Ben finally broke it with a nearly soundless chuckle of amusement._

_"What is it?" Jamie flared, hissing under his breath._

_"The Doctor." Ben nodded with his chin. "Looks harmless like 'at, doesn't he?"_

_They stared at the little man, insensible to the world._

_Polly's lips quivered. "Oh, yes." She managed. "Quite harmless." Her lips quivered harder. "Quite harmless indeed."_

_It came over them all at the same time, the incongruity of "harmless" tied to a tiny little man that had just single-handedly saved them all. They stuffed their guffaws into their sleeves, not wanting to risk waking him up from a desperately needed healing._

_"He'll be fine, mate." Ben said in his rough way. He pushed his mug into the Piper's hand. "A cup of good black tea, that's what yew need."_

_"I dinna drink tea."_

_"There's yer problem." Ben put his hands under Jamie's arms and pulled him to his feet with that shocking strength he had. "Let's leave 'm to his rest. Just you watch. He'll be up and about and running like a looney about the Console Room in no time."_

_"We've seen this before, Jamie." Polly said kindly. "This isn't the first time he's been knocked spinning...this isn't even his first body!"_

_"His what!" Jamie was frog-eyed._

_"Let's take it outside, gents and Duchess." Ben said practically. "'E needs his beauty sleep." And with that Ben strolled out, leaving a very annoyed Polly. Jamie swallowed his grin-he knew Polly was used to being the one who thought of these things first._

_The young Cockney led them to the sitting-room off to the side of the sleeping berths and stretched his small frame before the artificial fire. Not to miss her chance, Polly took her cue to take control and she did it by clarifying her strange comment._

* * *

_"When his body gets worn out, he...gets a new one." Polly tried to explain. "We saw it happen, Ben and I. We were fighting the Cybermen, and he started getting weaker and weaker...almost transparent at the end. Then all of a sudden, he...it's hard to..." She shuddered at the memory. "He went to the TARDIS and it looked as though he wouldn't let us in, but I think now it was the TARDIS, trying to keep us from the beginning of the effects."_

_"I doon understand ye!" Jamie protested. "He gets a new body? Like growin' a tree? Or takes someone's body? Or trades it like one o' the Good Neighbors?"_

_"Listen, Jamie," Ben's usual humor was missing. He was grave. "We came in to find the Doctor on the floor in a heap, and the TARDIS was going all 6's and 7's!"_

_"Eh?"_

_" #%*%& crazy." Ben translated._

_"Ben!" Polly exclaimed._

_"Well, it's true. The TARDIS was actin' like a demon-possessed! The controls were movin' by themselves! The lights were going on and off. The floor and the walls were hummin' like bees in a hive! Some of the rooms changed and never went back to the way they were, though we didn't know it at the time...The part that rises and falls was just...like a blender in an empty bowl, a bouncin' about!" He caught Jamie's expression and mimed the motion with his hands._

_"The sound was just...like nothing I've ever heard!" Polly picked up the story. "If the TARDIS was a human, I'd say it was...screaming."_

_"Cor, that's a way o' puttin' it." Ben agreed. "Screamin' like a wild cat...or a woman in labor!"_

_"And then it all stopped, mostly." Polly sighed. "Our ears were ringing for ages after...and the Doctor...he was lying in a puddle of his clothes like...like a doll a child had flung into the corner and forgotten..." She stopped and gulped hard; the memory still affected her. Ben reached over and rubbed her shoulder soothingly, his easygoing face creased with the same memory. "I remember thinking...he looked shrunken down, and his old watch-cloak was all...burned looking and holed as if giant moths had eaten it up...we turned him over and then...that was when we saw his face had changed...his face had changed and his body and even some of his clothes with it. He was really shrunken down...into a much smaller, younger man."_

_"I know it's hard to take." Ben sighed. "I didn't believe it was the Doctor for the longest time. The Duchess...she copped to it long before I did. She's smarter than I am when it comes to the Doctor."_

_"Oh, shush, Ben." Polly scolded._

_"He...just changed?" Jamie was still trying to accept this._

_They nodded._

_"What did he look like before?"_

_"I'll show you." Polly rose and left the room, leaving Jamie alone with his swirling skull and Ben._

_Ben was awkwardly silent, wanting to soothe Jamie but not knowing how to do it unless it was rough Cockney healing._

_Polly returned with a large photograph in a frame. "Here. I took this not long before we went to Mondas..." She put it in the Piper's hands._

_"It disnae look like..!" The Piper protested at the sight of a taller, broader and ultimately frail-looking Patrician with beautiful white hair curled like smooth water down the sides of his face. It was as unlike the carelessly raked mop of black hair Jamie knew to be the Doctor's—he had often (and privately) thought of the little man's hair as a peasant's besom of twigs worn black and frayed from too much sweeping about a sooty hearth._

_And the hands...if The Doctor's hair was an embarrassment of fashion that would be rejected by the Wild Man of the Moors, his hands were small and strong and beautiful. They were so perfectly proportioned they barely seemed like the hands of a living man's, always clean as a baby's after a bath no matter what he was doing with them, and his nails were trimmed neat. If there was any vanity to the little man it was his hands, but Jamie had guessed it was because he expressed himself with them more than he really did his words._

_But this old gentleman had long, elegant and pale hands, slender crane's claws suited for violin or a ridiculously wealthy laird's fine scribing; they were wrapped in worn out fingerless gloves that oddly enough, matched the sable fur cap on his head (both articles had seen better days). _

_A beautiful blue waistcoat of cobweb-fine cloth wrapped around his lean middle, girdling a snow-white shirt pleated like a Church Bishop's Christmas Best. A shimmering red-gold watch gleamed below his ribs, its crystal unscratched and clear as water. The cravat about the thin throat was soft and dear to the price, hemmed with a glowing pearl stickpin on a bar of the same red gold as the watch. The mouth was thin and stern, the jaw stubborn and sharp, the apples of his cheeks pronounced with age. Wisdom had sunk deep into his large, round eyes and swept gossamer brows upon a proud skull._

T_he shoes were hard-looking half-boots of polished Moroccan leather-the sort that Jamie's feet would never bear in a hundred years. The trousers shocked him: In the midst of all the severity and elegance, emphasized with the seeming poverty of cap and gloves, this Doctor was wearing a cheerful tartan print the color of blue borage honey._

_Ben and Polly waited, smiling, for their youngest Companion to go through the expected protests._

_"Wait..." Jamie breathed. "I see him. I can see him in there!"_

_"You can?" Ben and Polly crowded in to look at the photograph, but it was still the same as ever. They glanced at each other over the boy's shoulders, and then at the boy. "Where?"_

_"The eyes." Jamie pointed gingerly, not wanting to put his fingertip on the precious glass. "Look at 'em."_

_"They're nothing like they are now, mate." Ben protested with a bemused smile. "They're big and brown and round. His eyes now are small and narrow and green."_

_"Nah, that's nae what I mean. Look at 'em." Jamie was smiling now. He was sure of it. "There's a merry divil hiding behind those eyes. Ye can see it." He moved his fingertip down to the stern, thin mouth. "Those are laughter-lines scored deep in the flesh. He kin frown with the best, but that's a face that would prefer tae laugh."_

_Ben and Polly looked at each other, then back hard at the photograph._

_"I never thought of it," Polly said slowly. "But I suppose you're right. He did have a sense of humor...it didn't always come out when you expected it to."_

_"That's the truth an' half! He looked so stern all the time...like a nun with a ruler...and he was stern most of the time," Ben rubbed his hair wild. "Dodo called him kindly yet scarey. I guess we never thought past the appearances."_

_"A man with that much life in his eyes must know how to laugh." Jamie said firmly. "And ye can see the life fair boilin' out o' him." He chuckled softly. "And the colors in him are the same."_

_"Colors? What d'yew mean, mate?"_

_"Look, the colors." Jamie pointed to the beautiful blue waistcoat. "That's the same shade o'blue when he wears his blue shirts." He explained. "And he's wearin' the same black coat...the cravat has almost the same pattern as his dark blue bow-tie..."_

_"I never noticed!" Polly exclaimed. "Oh, it's the very coat! And the tie...I feel a prize fool, don't I?"_

_"Yer not a fool. It was right there, hidin' in plain sight, Duchess." Ben was laughing. "Cor blimey!"_

_"And he's wearin' Hunter's Tartan." Jamie finished in satisfaction._

_"I don't understand, Jamie." Polly confessed._

_"Hunter's Tartan. That's what a man wears when...when ye're lookin' for something but don't want to be seen much yerself..." He wasn't sure if he was explaining this correctly. He thought a bit. "Camo...flage?" He tried the French word slowly._

_"Oh, but Jamie, do you think he knows about Tartan prints?"_

_"I guess it's a better question to ask if he doesn't, Duchess." Ben pointed out. "He did do an awful lot of running around Earth for a long, long time."_

_"That's true. Marco Polo...Saladin...Scotland wouldn't be too much of a stretch in comparison..."_

_The three were quiet, looking over the image with new eyes. The old man was standing proudly, posing with a grumpy moue at having his image captured, but he didn't really look like he hated it. There was a faint, almost childish smile of hesitant vanity ghosting about his face about all the fuss Polly was making of him. His thumbs hooked neatly inside the tuck of his frock coat, squaring back his arrow-level shoulders._

_"Maybe he made a lot of jokes and we were too stupid to know," Ben mused. "He was a clever old geezer."_

_"More clever than he is now?"_

_"Gor, no! His clever was scary! Different kind of clever." Ben was smiling reminiscently. "The Doctor back then would never have acted a jape or dressed up silly...I mean, he could act silly, but you never forgot he was acting."_

_"At least not that we know." Polly said softly. Her large, expressive eyes had grown dark with a thought. "He was always so careful..." Her voice dropped even further._

_"Careful for what?" Jamie was curious. Polly had that look on her face that said she was thinking...and when she did, even the Doctor jumped to her conclusions._

_"He's hiding!" Polly's voice was barely a whisper, but a thread of solid iron gave her convictions. "Look, we all wear clothes not to just protect ourselves from the elements, but to make a statement. What we are is in our clothing."_

_The men looked at her, baffled._

_"Think about it," she urged them. "Can any of you think of anyone more clever, more resourceful, more...anything than the Doctor?" They shook their heads no. "Of course not. But if you were looking for the most clever, resourceful person in the Galaxy, would you be looking for an old gentleman who looks like he should be teaching dusty old maths at some tired old boy's school wrapped in ivy with...with fat swans floating about the lilypads in idyllic old bliss?" She waved the image. "Someone who met Marco Polo, Saladin...Genghis Khan...Napoleon...Voltaire...Da Vinci...all the greatest minds of Earth and we don't know who he's met off it!"_

_"Got a point, Duchess." Ben rubbed his jaw. "Met and survived 'em. Some of those fellows, I wouldn't have lasted a minute in their shadow!"_

_"He's never given us an explanation as to why he's wandering about, willy-nilly, in a TARDIS, just gives us some sort of vague answer about how there's so much to see or do. And yet he jumps into trouble as soon as it finds him."_

_"Aye, even when he was a brittle old man, he was still tough as an old turkey!" Ben chuckled. "He said once that he mellowed a bit around humans...kin ye imagine what he must have been like before we met him? Must've been a hard nut!"_

_"Yes, I know. You could see it in him..." Polly was smiling at a memory. "So, let's think about it. He's bouncing about time and space all by himself, with very little explanation for his actions. Does he answer to some higher authority? I very much doubt it. If he was he would have complained about them in some way—or we would have run into them."_

_"Maybe he's just doing what he wants?" Ben offered. "I can't imagine anyone ever telling the Doctor what to do."_

_"No, but it must have happened, if you think logically that's the only explanation."_

_"Now yer usin' the bad words, Duchess."_

_"Stop it, you." Polly tapped Ben on the forehead. "It is logical. Even though it can't steer itself, the TARDIS is immensely powerful, and in the wrong hands it would be a horrible weapon! And yet one person is in charge of it? Just one? It's inconceivable that it would be used the way the Doctor's using it...to just...bounce about like a tourist or idle sightseeker._

_"He's not abusing it, but he is using it to get around from one place to another, and whenever we run into trouble...well...the Doctor simply can't resist meddling. It's as if he's incapable."_

_"Yer talkin' about that speech he gave on the Moonbase," Ben said sagely._

_"And as soon as it's over, what do we do but jump back into the TARDIS. We never stay long enough for anyone to ask questions...or force answers."_

_"Gwon, Duchess." Ben's normally cherubic face had darkened. "Yer sayin' the Doctor's on the run, like half me old mates on the TEAZER?"_

_"Well, I don't know how half your old mates behave, but if they're following his pattern of behavior it makes sense."_

_"Yeah, but what would the Doctor be runnin' from? We're talkin' about the Doctor, Polly. Not someone who broke some laws or did orful things and is hidin' from em."_

_"He never mentions his own people, Ben, and look at how many times he's played the underdog and helped people who are suffering under unjust laws. He's broken plenty of laws! He's put his own neck on the line to get people he's never known and just met...out of the bonds of tyranny. Doesn't that sound like a sympathetic reaction to you?"_

_That stopped them in their tracks. Jamie could feel his heart pounding inside his rib-cage._

_"Bloody Gipsy Nell, you're right." Ben said in wonder. "Blimey! We're travelin' with someone on the lam!" The young man's eyes were wide with shock. "He doesn't want to steer the TARDIS, does he? Maybe he's the reason why it won't steer right to begin with? Or maybe it's broken and he daren't fix it! If he knows where he's going, so would the people lookin' for him!" He smacked his fist into his palm. "That's wot half me old mates in the Merchant's'd do. They'd jump ship wi'out warning and maybe yew saw im again in a few years, maybe yew never did!"_

_"It all fits." Polly blinked. "The only thing that steers right on this TARDIS is the Doctor's sense of right and wrong."_

_Slightly dazed from the overload of too much insight, the three wandered down to the kitchen and made more tea._

_A lot of it. _

_Jamie decided he liked Ben's tea, but wouldn't tell him so to his face. Polly put together a pyramid of sandwiches using the fresh ingredients the Doctor kept for their use. The Bovril's Paste made a hot broth that made Jamie nostalgic for slaughtering time in Scotland, but knew enough of Polly not to say so. Anyway, she didn't think making broth constituted as cooking because it was too simple (so said someone who never had to eat without killing or growing or cleaning something first)._

_"__We know at least some of his carryin' about is an act," Ben said at last. He sipped from his mug and toyed with a triangle of bread. "He acts up the most around people who've never met him before."_

"_Yes, but it doesn't always work the way he wants it to work," Polly hummed. "Half the time, someone's figured out how smart he is, and they want to use that for their own purposes."_

"_Or they believe the act and want to kill him."_

"_It's a disguise and a good one." Polly passed a dish of sliced apples to a grateful Jamie. "If you ask me, he really would like to be an explorer, or a tourist of the Galaxies. That...that childlike wonder he has when he's in a new place...that's not at all faked. It's real."_

"_Ey, and that's the biggest thing that marks him as different." Ben said knowledgeably. "Most people would get tired of that, but not him. It's fresh and new every time."_

"_I wonder how old he really is." Polly scrunched up her face in thought. "He must be much older than we are."__Jamie didn't think he would have the courage to ask. He struggled to return his attention to what Ben was saying. _

"_-that gift he has for winding up in trouble...ugh. He just moves from one spot to another."_

"_Maybe he's just trying to have what good memories he can?" Jamie asked in a small voice.__The older humans looked at each other and then at the third. Jamie's head was down and he hunched over his food with a rare lack of interest._

"_I mean..." The Piper said in that same, small voice, "If he is a fugitive...there's things he probably doesn't want to remember. Or he can't remember because...it wouldn't do him any good, would it? That means living with your eyes facing forward, and having what fun you can get...because you don't really know how long it will last."_

_Polly and Ben traded a long look of understanding. If the Doctor was a fugitive, Jamie would of course reach out to him with all his heart. He was a fugitive too—an exile unable to go back to his home. He had not been on the TARDIS long, but when he wasn't too busy to think about it, the boy was wrenched with the pain of his loss. _

_The sight assured Polly. She and Ben loved the Doctor and they loved the good parts about the adventures they had, but they missed home terribly and would return as soon as the Doctor put them in the closest passable time-zone. That didn't change the fact that they worried about the Doctor being by himself—he clearly needed not to be alone; other people brought out the very best in him and tamed his worst impulses._

_Ben gave her a tiny wink. She knew he was thinking the same thing. Since the beginning, Jamie had almost instinctively gravitated to the Doctor. Perhaps it was because it was the Doctor who saved his people from total massacre; or the fact that the boy sensed the closeness between the other two humans and felt like an outsider intruding. The Doctor had responded to the boy's need for companionship with an unthinking affection; unlike the Doctor he used to be, this Doctor was unaware of things like maintaining personal space. He didn't have boundaries for someone who needed touch, and Jamie was thirsty for contact._

_If anything could reassure Polly that the Doctor was an alien, it was the way he made snap decisions about people that always proved right later. No human unless they had ESP could have his track record of reading people—and few humans would be able to retain that childlike, innocent belief in the good living in all people. Despite seeing humans and aliens at their worst, that funny little man never grew jaded at their foibles and mistakes._

_Jamie, battered from the horrors of Cullodon, needed to be around that goodness. He was drawn to it like a cat to a crackling fireplace. In the Doctor's aura he was granted the grace of tolerance and patience, and he wasn't treated as though he were foolish or sub-human. The strange little man was very tactile, the way the younger uncle was at a picnic; older and wiser and a mentor in that manner...but also young enough to remember what it was like to be a boy. Jamie needed to enjoy his youth now, before it left him forever.__A soft footstep made Jamie's ears prick up. He turned in his seat, face opening with hope._

"_Ah, hello." The Doctor said drowsily. His hair looked like a haystack, his clothes were rumpled, and bruises still colored his face. But he was on his feet. He stopped in the doorway and yawned behind his hand. "Sorry..." He mumbled. "I don't think I'm quite awake just yet..."_

_Polly flung herself into his arms and squeezed him tight. "There you are, we were starting to get worried!" She leaned into his shoulder, felt his throat vibrate in a chuckle as he returned her embrace, patting her on the back with his hand. A sudden sting of tears misted her eyelashes and she blinked, sniffing with her burning nose.__It had been a close call, for all their bravado to Jamie. She closed her eyes as she felt Ben's happy crow, hugging the Doctor and herself tighter within each other, and then there was Jamie on the other side, the lads chattering and jibing.__Polly had to let a few tears slip, otherwise her control would shatter. The risk the Doctor had gone through just for their sakes had been no more than he always did...and someday, she knew, it would be what killed him. _

"_Oh, dear, Polly. I'm sorry it was as bad as all that," the Doctor was saying._

"_I'll be all right, Doctor." She sniffed and looked into that careworn face. "I just have to...get all of this out now. Don't want it to s...stick around..." She kissed his cheek and held him tight. __Again, she felt the hum of his chuckle against her cheek and he rocked her gently as he would have a child. In the brief months they'd known this particular incarnation, she had been given more paternal affection than her own father would ever dreamed. __Her father wouldn't have put his life on the line for the sake of strangers, and she wasn't certain he would have cared so much for his own family and neighbors. Her father demanded filial loyalty on a daily basis...but the Doctor was the only one who would ever have hers._

"_Ye had us worried there, old fellow." Ben grinned from ear to ear. "Especially the nipper here."_

"_Ey!" Jamie's sunny smile split into a scowl. "I am not a nipper! Whatever that is!"_

"_Oh, you two..." The Doctor shuffled his way into the kitchen. "Bung over, Jamie. Is that tea?"_

* * *

**"Jamie! You're looking well!"**

Jamie felt a ridiculous grin split painfully across his face. Victoria's warm eyes glowed on the other side of the screen as she laughed at him. For a moment Time had rolled backwards and they were two young children again, not grown adults.

And in Victoria's case, very much grown. Always older than her years, she was now older than Jamie by a good hand; but to the Highlander's gaze she was still the same gloriously beautiful and sophisticated girl from the future he'd first known and protected.

Beautiful, graceful, an educated lass like a laird's daughter or fostering, she had always been perfect in his eyes. Perfect as the moon and just as attainable, it never stopped his feelings for her.

"How are ye, Victoria? Still reading up on the graphology or whatever it is?"

**"Now, Jamie,"** Victoria scolded. The lines in her face deepened cheerfully. **"Graphology isn't the best name, but it does work and it will have to do until something better comes along."** She tipped her head to one side thoughtfully. **"I like brain-writing, but while that's even better it's woefully unscientific!"**

"Och, not everything has to be scientific." Jamie scolded lightly. He backstrided a chair and flopped his arms across the top, jamming his chin on them like a child all the better to watch the woman. He wanted to soak in her every detail. "Especially sin' ye never told us why ye wanted tae make a study o'it." He complained.

**"Oh, you'll think me silly."**

"I've never thought ye silly once in my entire life!" Jamie protested quite loudly. "A bit hardheaded, perhaps, and slithy..."

**"Jamie!"** Victoria put her hands on her hips and stepped back from the screen, which gave Jamie a view of the Eye of Orion through the glass window of a lush-looking library full of books and two simple computer screens. **"You'll never stop teasing me, will you?"**

"Give me a reason." Jamie said merrily. "Sae have ye got anywhere in yer study?"

**"It's been marvelous. Forien agreed to take me through the entire length of the cirriculum. It's fascinating stuff, really. Handwriting is an excellent window into the writer's mind. If only I'd paid more attention to it when I was younger..."**

Jamie let her prattle on, memorizing her words for later—she was bound to quiz him to make sure he was listening. In the back of his head he mourned the situation. Something was always keeping them apart.

**"I said,"** Victoria repeated herself with considerably more volume, **"How is he?"**

"Eh? Oh. Ye mean the Doctair?" Jamie stammered, slapped into reality.

Victoria gave him a level look. **"Of course, Jamie. I already know how Zoe is doing—I do pity Dulkis-Is there anyone else to whom I should be referring?"**

"Er, well. He's good. We're all good. Everything's just good." Oops.

**"I _see_.**" Her eyes had narrowed. **"So why is everyone so good you look guilty?"**

Jamie thought about lying, but only for a second. Victoria could smell tricks like an old granny. "Och, we're resting up a bit. That diplomatic mission went a bit awry."

**"I've yet to meet a diplomatic mission that didn't."** She sighed. **"But he is all right..?"**

"Aye. He's in the bath right noo. Ye want me tae call him?"

**'Oh, no, no no no."** Victoria said quickly. **"We can always talk later. At any rate, I hope it's not a problem that I'm going to be here a while. It will take at least a few months to finish the core program..."**

"Of course not..."

He was just switching off the screen as the Doctor emerged.

* * *

"Idiot machine," The Doctor said to the hapless environmental controls as he stalked out in the ankle-length robe Jamie often heard him call "an atrocious monstrosity of thirsty fabric," rubbing his silver hair dry with a towel painted in Arcalian colors. The water had turned his head a dull pewter, and had the odd effect of lightening the glints within his green eyes. "They won't adjust to anything but Gallifreyan standard!"

"Ah, don't worry aboot it." Jamie told him. "Ye just missed Victoria."

"Oh? How's she doing?"

"In love with graphology. At least now I know why she wanted to train in it."

"Please enlighten me, would you?" The Doctor found his usual chair and flopped inside it, still scrubbing away.

"She's noticed the handwriting of people in her school changed after they joined, but she didn't think anything of it except proof they were getting more...mentally advance. If she has more training in reading it, she thinks, she can get a better judge on the mental state of the writer."

"Well that is one way of putting it." The Doctor was still quite ruffled that the Great Intelligence had come so close to invading Earth without his knowing about it. "Getting subliminated by that thing would...both advance and homogenize their mental states to the point it would reflect in their handwriting..."

"So now she wants to study it, in case something else would happen in the future."

"She never makes the same mistake twice," The Doctor mused. "Interesting point, and right..." He suddenly turned his head to one side and began banging water out of his ear. "Anything affecting the brain will come out in the handwriting. Or whatever expressive form the person uses for tool-making."

"I think she's still worried it will come back."

"Hmn. I would give it some time, Jamie. Not only was it defeated, the Brigadier gave it a good scolding. It's picked up enough humanity that it actually felt the sting of mockery." The little man smiled slightly, shaking his head. "What I would have given to have seen that." He mused. "Can you imagine him telling it to go back to Hell?"

"Yer not the only one. The man was born with a claymore in his hand, wasna he?"

"There aren't many true soldiers out there, Jamie. He's honestly, the only one I know because he holds his own life as a small, insignificant thing against the weight of the world's. You'll _never_ see him place himself above another's."

"Makes me wonder how he's lived so long."

"Um." The Doctor pursed his mouth to one side. "It's a well-known paradox. Most people die in combat because when they face death, they pause and inventory their loved ones. It's just a moment of hesitation, but it's usually enough. He doesn't have that hesitation because he's never unprepared to die."

"Huh. Well, he's one-quarter Gordon. That explains that."

"I have no idea what you mean."

"Everyone else's clan cries are meant tae be stirring up the enemy. Theirs is just, "_A Gordon! A Gordon!_" Jamie shuddered. "They fight like vampire panthers, all o' em."

"Can we get through one week without mentioning vampires?" The Doctor pleaded.

"Oops. Sorry, Doctair."

"You should be." The Doctor grumbled half-heartedly. "Are you going to Change before we go?"

"Aye. I put your suit in the back. I'm gunna try tae fix the problem with this kilt if ye dinna mind."

"What's wrong with your kilt?"

"It's the weights." Jamie fussed at the plaid draped over his lap. "I left it here at our last stop, and they cleaned it, Doctor!" He held up the cloth sadly. "They took the weights out o' the hem, and...Cleaned it wi' their infernal imitation soaps and water! Everybody knows ye can only clean a good plaid with fresh snow! Anything else will harm the threads!"

"Snow's a bit rare on Gallifrey, Jamie. Unless you live like a hermit in the slope-caverns of Mt. Lung...or happen to be caught in the Death Zone." The Doctor scowled.

"It's a travesty, it is." Jamie sulked. "A good plaid battered about like that. I knew the kine that made this pattern!"

"Why am I not surprised..." The Doctor picked up the yards of cloth and ran it through his fingers. "It won't take long to put weights back in." He soothed absently. Many things were pressing his mind and Jamie doubted the little man would continue to demonstrate patience for much longer.

Then he looked behind him. And saw the clothes Jamie had picked out.

There was a long, taut silence in which Jamie found great interest in the empty contents of his sporran.

"Jamie?"

"Aye?"

"Is there a particular reason for your selection?"

Jamie thought about it. "Mayhap."

The Doctor lifted up one eyebrow and sent the other crashing down, creating a stern glower indeed and somehow made it all the more impressive that he was still wet. "And that reason would be..?"

Jamie had stopped being afraid of the Doctor long ago. He didn't swallow, but he did face the green glare head-on with a glare of his own. "That 'tis time ye got out o' mourning, Doctor." He said at last.

"I have not been in mourning." Was the tight retort.

"Grieving, then!" Jamie snapped. "Ever since ye took me out o' Scotland ye've been wearin' colors for a funeral!" He knifed the air with his fingers. "Nae brightness to ye, nae glow! It's not what ye look like on the inside, Doctair," he persisted. "Ye do yerself no honor by wearing what they want ye to wear."

And, just a thought ahead of the other man, Jamie stood, his eyes open and honest. "I know how ye are, ye daft we chappie. Ye've spent most of yer life makin' yer enemies think the less o' ye. Well...this ye need tae do for ye'sel." He put as much urgency as he could in his voice. "There's too many of them here." He pressed. "Remind them who ye are...what ye are. Be yerself." He finished, clasping that short, broad shoulder.

_You don't know what you're asking,_ came the thought.

_I don't need to know everything. I'm just seeing that...whatever game you're playing...it's pulling a price out of you. Don't pay it. Tonight we have to be all pomp and circumstance. Be yourself for a night. __He squeezed the hard bone under the cloth. __At the least, they won't expect it._

_What will I do when you leave?_

Jamie felt his heart stop.

He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. The Doctor's words still echoed in the hollow dome of his brain-pan. He couldn't tell him he would never leave. Hadn't he left once before? Because the Time Lords were clever and cold and cruel. And Jamie was human; the Doctor would live through a hundred of Jamie's lives.

_You'll live. Because I'll never forgive you if you follow me across that River before your Time._

_...fair...enough._

The Doctor's head bowed down, hiding much of his face. He looked so very old in the dull light designed for Gallifreyan eyes. Old and weary. It was not the first time the Piper wondered what the CIA had made him do before he was allowed to pick him up again...and it wouldn't be the last.

"We've got a dinner tonight, and a show." The Piper smiled just a bit. "Ask some and they'll say the one is the other."

"They'll talk about you again!" The little man's voice burned with anger. "I won't have it, Jamie! It isn't worth it to me! Whatever I do tonight, they'll look at you when they talk of it!"

_"__Chan fhiach cuirm gun a còmhradh." __A feast is no use without good talk._

_Hah._

Jamie waited alone and sweating as the Doctor hid in his rooms. He asked himself if he'd overplayed his hand, but he had to reassure himself that he hadn't.

Finally, at long last, the Doctor came out wearing the suit.

"Well?" He asked with his eyebrows halfway to the sky.

"Ye look perfect, Doctor." Jamie made the sign with his fingers. "Ye look...yerself again. _ Is math an sgathan suil caraide." A Friend's Eye is a Good Looking-Glass._

The Doctor was just beginning to smile. "Come what may, we shall see what happens."


	7. Boredom: Good or Bad?

**7: Is Boredom Good or Bad?**

Summary: The Sontarans are still in Space. The Time Lords are planning. The Third Zone is about to be very unhappy. Guess who has to clean up the mess?

Characters: Second Doctor, 2nd Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, unspecified Time Lords. The CIA and Gallifreyans Galore. Ice Warriors, Sontarans, and Time Corridors, Oh My

* * *

Jamie collected his pipes; it gave his hands something to do and let him hide from the necessity of interacting with people in uncomfortable situations. Plus it gave him a reason to keep the Time Lords at a distance. They tended to be a little nervous about things they didn't understand.

Nervous. The Time Lords couldn't possibly be as nervous as himself.

The Doctor grumbled at the arrival of some unexpected mail (Jamie had long ago given up the hope that the Time Lord's relatives would ever try to contact him, so it was probably just the usual report forms and legal disclaimers that required the Doctor explain every inch and ell of his existence).

"You must be joking," The Doctor glared furiously at his last report, and promptly stuffed it into the nearest waste disposal bin. Jamie kept his mouth shut. He had see enough of the print to know this was yet another request for clarification on his predecessor-"the Original Doctor's"-past cases. The Doctor frequently complained that it was a struggle to remember much of being the old gentleman, which explained why he was happy to live in the present.

Still muttering, the little man turned a padded envelope upside down and perked up as his replacement SRD fell into his palm.

"Shame about Chessene ruining the last one," Jamie mused for the benefit of any eavesdroppers.

"At least she couldn't use it even if she got that Time machine fully operational." The Doctor smiled. "This will come in handy..." He hummed snatches of a children's lullaby under his breath as he pulled out the tiniest screwdriver Jamie had ever seen, and mucked about with the SRD for a few minutes, pleasantly distracted by something while Jamie prayed they wouldn't get in trouble for tampering with CIA property.

"Are we ready?" He stuffed the Device into one of his pockets. They produced their wrists and put up with the scanning by the wall computer. After a few seconds passed, the Doctor's expression of waiting anticipation darkened. He scowled and hammered a reset command. The machine garbled at him and he snorted. "Idiot machine," He said at last.

Jamie tried to think of how many times he'd heard the Doctor say _that_ in the past few days. "What's wrong this time?" He asked wearily.

"Magnetic Storm." The little man retorted. "They could just let us use the TARDIS! They're taking too many precautions if you ask me. It's just a Magnetic Storm! We have them all the time!" Just as quickly his face changed. "Oh," he cleared his throat. "Drat it. Time Corridor."

"Time Corridor?"

"Spacetime Transduction Channel. They don't like magnetic storms past a certain amp. Grrr." The Doctor glared at the offending equipment. "The Conference must be on Xenobia."

Jamie knew enough of Gallifrey by now (and if you asked him, he would say too much), that he knew what that meant. "Och. So we're put on hold while they make sure all the non-Time Lords won't get lost on the way to the station."

"Very, very true, Jamie." The Doctor murmured. "Lost in so many different senses of the word..."

A snapping, popping sound finalized a program, and the Arch sent them through without warning. Jamie jumped slightly, clutching at his polished blackthorn pipes, willing his heart to settle. They were in a T-Mat Room three times the size of the Console Room in the TARDIS.

"Yes," the Doctor was saying. "Time Corridors are useful for getting a large number of people into a single point across different portions of time and space—practical too. All you need is a basic degree in Wormhole Engineering. Problem is the _Daleks_ use Time Corridors. That's how they sent us from 1960's Heathrow to Victoriana to Skaro..."1

"Noo that reminds me, Doctair," Jamie hastily re-adjusted his pipes at his shoulder and waited for the boring scans to make sure they weren't armed with energy weapons, or were possessed by hostile life-forms or carrying unwholesome diseases, "Why were they so determined tae use ye for that muckabout on Skaro? Ye don't exactly have the best reputation o' doing what they want."

"No idea when it comes to Daleks. You'd think I was the last of the Time Lords with all their fuss!" The Doctor sniffed with a blitheness that he would come to regret with good reason centuries later, and hopped off the Mat to scamper down a long and gloomy corridor lined with showy displays of art.

Jamie followed as best as he could, aware that the Doctor wasn't _really_ running off without him; it was just how they acted in uncertain situations. If anyone observed them at this time, it would give the impression they were more interested in their conversation than their surroundings. "...all 7 conduits have to be watched constantly. Otherwise we could have the embarrassment of a Conference with invited guests stranded in the docks with no means to get home to their rightful planet—or their rightful time zone!"

* * *

Keeping up with the little man was a workout on the best of days. "Warmed the blood," Ben would joke. Jamie found himself in a cold sweat as he stepped lively. Too late for second thoughts, he scolded himself. And he was right, wasn't he? If he was wrong the Doctor would have simply refused to go along with this plan.

The T-Mat had put them in a nearly deserted section of the station. The lights were dimmed; a few members from various castes passed them in both directions, their faces remote and clouded with troubling thoughts. They barely noticed the two newcomers enough to get out of the way.

"We're going to do quite a bit of walking, Jamie. Most of the actual activity is in the center of the Station; the outer sections are reserved for transportation and defense purposes..."

"Ere, Doctor, slow down for a moment!" Jamie scolded lightly. "Just how big is this Conference?"

"I've no idea."

"Well, how many people would be brought in?"

"I tell you, Jamie, I don't know. There's never been a matter like this in almost 500,000 years." The Doctor paused, spinning on the ball of his foot with his hands clasped behind his back. "A situation in which the Time Lords have been directly set up for intervening against other races...it just isn't done." His eyes were sharp on the Piper, and able to pass a message without talking or telepathy—just a knowing look: _They do it, but they've never been framed for it before. I'll bet they're feeling pretty insulted by now..._

"There's a first time for everything, Doctor." Jamie reminded him. "Wi' luck they'll recover."

"I hope you're right..." They rounded a right-angle corner (odd to see these inside a round space station), and almost drew up halt at a triangle of too familiar, remote-faced officials in sober uniforms with their hands clasped neatly before their fronts. Jamie's sense of coldness deepened to the chill of midwinter on the High Tor. He recognized them as the three at the Doctor's Trial: the ones that determined the Doctor die and live as an exile on Earth without his Companions.

"'Eaven and 'ell ain't this wunderful," The Doctor suddenly slipped into an eerily correct imitation of Ben's Cockney.

"Sorted, Mate." Jamie chimed in with his own voice but very much Ben's language.

As usual, the Tribunal was slow and serene in action, thought, and speech. They often communicated telepathically amongst each other, with different members demonstrating different personalities for the group. The Doctor had once warned Jamie that it was considered rude to bring that up in _any_ sort of conversation.

_"__That gift they possess is considered a crippling liability to others." He'd said quietly. "They are the Tribunal because there is no other place for them in Time Lord Society. Don't ever forget that, Jaime. If they so choose they will destroy lives, planets, galaxies...remember that if you give them your courtesy, it will be more respect than they expect to receive in an eternity of lifetimes."_

* * *

"Doctor." That one was the same man Jamie first heard. Sometimes, in his nightmares, Jamie re-dreamed that chillingly benevolent voice and the terror they all felt, so frightened it isolated them each in their own private hell...and the look on the Doctor's face. Oh, that look. Horror wasn't enough of a word for that. The Doctor had been terrified for his very soul.

The Doctor had stopped, of course. He was the smallest of the present Time Lords, and his face gave nothing away. "A Tribunal Hearing offworld? A bit odd, isn't it?" He asked with an even tone.

"It is our duty."

"I see."

Jamie hated how the Doctor always slipped into another identity when he was around certain of the Time Lords. Like the Tribunal. They had been prepared to calmly and regretfully execute him for his crimes, but in the end were instrumental in changing his punishment. At least they never tried to call him anything but Doctor. That was more than a lot of Gallifreyans ever did. Jamie was never sure if they were being courteous or if it was their version of kindness.

In the meantime, the Doctor's green eyes were going narrow. "Was there a reason why you spoke to me?" He asked it very quietly, like a man about to walk into a snake's pit.

"The Conference requires your presence as well as ours. We will not be idle observers; we are participants. Instead of your usual position in the court you will be on our platform."

"So I gathered when I received the formal invitation on pure gossamer, delivered by albino flying squirrels with mandolins." The Doctor snapped and sounded just exactly like a querulous old man at that moment. "What tune did yours play? Mine did a bang-up rendition of 'Pandaks From Pythia.'"

The Time Lord's face flickered. For a crazy instant, Jamie thought the taller man was going to _smile_ at the Doctor, but no, he had to be crazy himself to think such a thing. Thankfully the moment passed quickly, and all was calm and controlled.

"The unfortunate loss of life on the Chimera is not the only reason for our attending."

That was a surprise. The Doctor and Jamie blinked at each other. "The Year's End, Doctair," Jamie mused, knowing the Doctor would get the full context of the proverb: _Is is the Year's End that shows the Fisherman's luck._

"Quite right, Jamie." The Doctor's mouth quirked to one side.

The shortest man, who reminded Jamie a bit of Borusa, turned his head quickly to one side as something caught his attention. "They are coming." He announced quietly.

The Doctor sighed. "After you," he said to the Tribunal. He gave Jamie a significant look. "Ready for a good retreat?"

"With you? Always." Jamie grinned. "Better than a bad charge."

* * *

The first Time Lord to react to the Doctor's appearance was (unfortunately), Madame Supervisor.

The Tribunal led the way to their usual position in the courtroom—which they used even when they were not on duty (It was a fine point; their roles demanded they be on duty at any time). In concession to the non-Tribunal parties, there were chairs but the Doctor pointedly ignored them, choosing to stand. Jamie shrugged and followed suit.

The Tribunal member Jamie thought of as "the Tall One" had noticed. "You may sit if you wish."

"Thank you." Jamie said courteously. And remained standing.

The Tall One glanced at the Doctor. "The trial may last for hours."

"He's used to walking for hours on end." The Doctor said calmly. "Standing still is quite a luxury."

The point was not pressed, mostly because the Tribunal was the least intrusive of all the Time Lords in Jamie's experience, but partly because the Madame Supervisor arrived at just that moment.

She drew herself up—all six feet of her—resplendent in her robes of office. Behind her the honor guards froze as well. The face she wore was not one for amusement.

"Doctor," She said coolly, and everyone could tell she was frustrated at not being able to refer to him by his Parolee Number in public... "You were granted _in mufti_ permission for the upcoming delegation, not this function."

"Oh, dear." The Doctor didn't miss a beat. "I must have skimmed over that. I don't know how I could have been such a silly old idiot."

"Flying squirrels, Doctair." Jamie said wisely. "They distract ye every time."

This time, Jamie decided he was well and truly cracked in the head, because he was almost willing to swear on a Bible the Tribunal was trying not to smile.

_So this is madness. Or they really don't like the CIA. Ah, well._

The Madame Supervisor kept calm, but matters boded no good for the Doctor later. "You will attire."

Jamie wasn't sure what was so special about that particular choice of wording, or the way it was said, but it was clearly a mistake on her part.

Amongst the slow-filling courtroom of pressing bodies, the Doctor squared back his shoulders and stuck his thumbs into his lapels, his jaw coming out as his eyes narrowed. Jamie thought of the older man the Doctor used to be. Under the skin of a younger body, that old, grumpy academic was coming out and showing what he was made of.

"I," he answered back in a voice of stone that was very low and yet carried like the ripples of a pebble into a calm pool, "am a renegade, a convicted criminal, and an exile. I will not conform to pretense, Madame Supervisor." His eyes hardened to stone. "You will see me attire when I am a proper member of this society."

Which would be when the sun froze stiff and you could paint a rainbow plaid.

The woman glared down at the Doctor, but the Doctor merely tipped his head up so he could look down his nose at her. It was beautifully done, but Jamie was worried. The level of anger rising from the harridan was not encouraging, though the Doctor was cool as a cucumber.

Again, the Piper had the sensation that the Doctor that used to be was present more than the Doctor he knew. He even carried himself like a stiff-limbed old gentleman, his mouth set forward and his brow aiming at the reddening face above his.

"We will discuss this after the proceeding."

"I am, of course, at your _disposal_."

"Och, Doctair," Jamie broke in. "Where be ye manners? The Lady should _always_ have the last word!"

"So she should." The Doctor smiled sweetly. "My apologies, Madame Supervisor." And he kept the smile fixed on his face like a thick layer of paint, never changing it as _she_ changed through several colors.

The Piper did not imagine the air of relief when she left for her post on the opposite side of the room.

"Well done, Jamie." The Doctor said under his breath. The moment was gone; he was back to the Doctor Jamie knew and loved.

"Just savin' ye from y'self as usual." Jamie shook his head fondly. By this time he was noticing the glances at the Doctor—and the askance expressions—were getting more and more common. A few elbows were nudging into ribs. Eyebrows were floating skyward. And the Doctor was looking at them right back. Jamie hadn't a clue. The suit was a copy of the Doctor's best-loved choices: a dark blue tie holding a bright blue shirt at the throat, black frock coat and a green handkerchief hanging loosely from his front pocket. The Piper had finally selected a McPhee print for the trousers—unless one was up close it looked solid grey; the black and white threads blended well.

Victoria had often mused, charmed and puzzled, that the Doctor always chose the cool colors of Earth and Water, but his personality was all Fire and Air. It was not the only contradictory thing about the little man, who was an insolvable puzzle to even his own people.

* * *

"Is something wrong, Piper?"

Jamie jumped slightly. "Just confused at your people again." He said honestly. "They're staring at him like they've never seen him before."

The Tribunal Lord's mouth twitched. This was the medium-height Time Lord, and Jamie couldn't help but think of him as Two as he thought of his compatriots as One (the shortest and brun) and Three (the tallest and towheaded). "It is a mannerism of the Celestial Intervention Agency that their agents dress...as invisibly as possible and that usually means their House Robes." Just as Jamie was thinking that explained the 'in mourning' colors, the man added, "He is announcing to everyone that he exists. The CIA is not pleased, and people will be curious."

Jamie sighed. "Ye people can be very complicated."

"They are also confused that he wears green. It is not an historically auspicious color. It is the color of the Death Zone."

"Ye Arcalians have Green in yer colors, and they're healers!"

"That is related. You should ask him someday."

Jamie paused, and looked at the man. Really looked at him. "Why is it," he asked impulsively, "Ye place yer own people under more laws and regulations than ye do others?"

"It is the way we are. We do not decide the fate of lives lightly. The weight of our laws makes the decision clearer."

"But no lighter."

They nodded at each other and by mutual consent, drew back to their own personal spaces.

* * *

Jamie wasn't comfortable at all with being near the Tribunal...or the fact that they had to associate with them tonight...but his instincts were telling him it was the safest place to be right now.

The Doctor was just thinking that they should have had one last trip to the Zero Room when it finally started. A combined shuffling of bodies and settling predated the swell of long-familiar music. The little man felt his eyes glaze over at the fanfare of the Gallifreyan Anthem. Oh, Rassilon. And in the appropriately solemn long-beat measure, too. This was going to take forever.

It is considered gauche to not play all the stanzas of the Gallifreyan Anthem.

There are many stanzas.

Somewhere between the part that saluted the fields of redgrass and violescent dusk and the part about the Novaya Zemlya Effect upon the mountains, the Doctor felt the first warning creep of stupor slide over his brain. He caught himself with a start, horrified that he might fall asleep standing on his feet—but he was also impressed with himself that he had put up with this pomp and ceremony for centuries before finally running away.

The self-congratulatory mood kept him awake through the praise of the iridescent clouds and icebows of the North. It wore off by the time the anthem got to the parhelic circle raptures.

He felt Jamie shift close to his side, his warm Human body clouded in his natural aura. Moving discreetly, the Piper shifted his pipes at rest and wordlessly put his hand on the Doctor's shoulder. The Doctor was glad of the contact; Jamie's mind was cool and calm at the core, while at its surface level it was annoyed, bored, impatient and worried about the future.

Oh, finally. That was the last of it. The Doctor inhaled and exhaled very quietly.

"_Doctor, why are the Shobogans here?"_

The Doctor's gaze snapped across the room. Oh, my word. Jamie wasn't joking. He counted at least twenty of the Outsiders huddled in a surly little knot in the room—and wouldn't you know, right next to them, another twenty of the regular Outsiders, all skins, leathers, and Stone Age weapons at hand, trading friendly glares with each other and scaring the delegates stiff. Grown men cowered behind their beards in far corners, convinced the proceedings would end in disgrace and bloodshed.

"_I've no idea but things just got a lot more interesting."_ The Doctor whispered back. Ten minutes later, he thought to himself: _In a way, it is reassuring to have a bad suspicion confirmed. It not only means you are right, it means your instincts are still in working order._

And _then_ the Martians showed up in what they had come to think of as "Full Ice Warrior Regalia."

"_I do believe I'm just about run out of surprise." _The Doctor mused.  
_  
"Do ye remember seeing them__ on t__he Space Station?" _Jamie wondered. He seemed to remember a few green-scaled corpses, but they might have been another species...

"_I have no idea. It was all a blur after I told you to run."_ The Doctor cringed at the admission. He tried not to think of how his last clear recollection of the Station was that of a Stontaran staserifle aiming at his hearts.

"Aye, well, I can't remember that much either." Jamie said simply. Not only did he not remember much of the weeks of going mad in a rotting tomb...he didn't want to remember.

The Doctor felt his throat tighten at the notion that his piper, who loved music so much, had gone as mad as a bard of the old legends. As if to echo this thought, Jamie's fingers tightened slightly upon the Doctor's shoulder. The Doctor absently reached up and rested his hand over the boy's—the man's, now.

Gracious, how much time had passed. Jamie had been so young in those days...

_And I was young too. So very young. And Jamie knew I was 450 years old, but he still didn't...believe me in a way. Now he believes me, because I act older. I suppose he thinks I should act this way; I wonder if that's it? _The side of his mouth twisted up by a fraction, thinking wistfully and ruefully and ironically about how Time twisted them all like so much taffy in the end.

_I do miss those days,_ he admitted to himself. _ I miss having the fun of being younger. I miss being able to play... in the beginning I was re-living all those lost chances to be a child again, but it felt so good...I felt so much like me. The Original Doctor never got that chance to be what I was doing...The Time Lords broke him before he could learn the way a child learns..._

He swallowed again, trying to muddle through his thoughts before the dark cloud of longing finished descending upon his mind. _...The way they broke me. And they'll break me again before they turn me into that big tall Light Bulb in velvet and frills..._

As always, the thought hurt. He'd had such hopes for himself in the future, but all those years of starting at the very bottom and re-working his way up...oh, heavens. To only achieve his own apex while he was dying of radiation...there was something both terrifying and triumphant in that; he could only draw comfort on the fact that his future self had finally, completely been in control of his own destiny when he collapsed and turned into the Booming Bohemian...

_...But the Time Lords are the entire reason why I died in the first place,_ he mused with no small bitterness. _Caged for so long, he was so __hungry__ when he was finally free in the TARDIS...and she was free...they were both finally...free. That hunger led him to take that crystal and set the events in motion... _

The fingers tightened again, sending warmth through his skin. Jamie was whispering his name, worried. The little Time Lord glanced to the Piper, momentarily confused. His awareness with the present cleared up; his gaze re-focused on the confused face before his own.

And behind him, the Tribunal was quietly watching them both, their faces calm and remote and ever-so-gently compassionate...compassionate in the way those who live on a distant mountain are compassionate about the small, short lives living beneath them in the city far below. Something clenched up and roiled in the Doctor's stomaches, and he forced himself to hold still—mentally, physically, and emotionally. Everything went stop. _Just...stop for now. You can never let them know you know so much of your future lives. They'll end you for certain._

"I'm all right, Jamie." The little Time Lord murmured.

"Ye don't look it." Jamie said stubbornly.

"Shush, they're finishing," he whispered hastily.

The Anthem finished and the displeasure of the public was barely under control. The Doctor watched the heads in the crowd. Dastari's people were here as well, and at least ten from every representative of the species slain on the Station, except-

-surely they wouldn't...

...but what if...?

No; outrageous. Impossible.

But what if...?

He started to breathe a little too deeply as his hearts pummeled his interior ribs.

"_Easy, Doctair,"_ Jamie whispered.

The Doctor was damping his mind down, filtering his memories, separating neurochemicals in his brain to lower his reaction time. "_I don't see any Androgums, do you?"_

"_Nae."_ Jamie was glad to report.

Conscious of being where anyone could watch them, the two quieted down, but their nerves were rattled.

Androgums...they had reason to attend. Why weren't they?

Would it be because of their lowly status as menial servants? Ridiculous. The Doctor had reason to despise them, but logically, they should be attending.

What if...they were refusing the Council Session?

Oh, he hoped that wasn't the case! The possibilities to that would be...!

One thought flipped to another, too fast for his control and he felt himself grow a little pale about the cheeks. Jamie's hand on his shoulder was his anchor, holding him back, grounding him in place.

It didn't help that the Tribunal was acting as though an offplanet meeting with the three grouchy factions of Gallifrey (four if you counted the CIA) were present and under the same roof as their Third Zone ex-colony.

_Hmnnn wonder why Karn isn't here?_ The Doctor leaped eagerly into this newly discovered question. Karn had more right to be here than anyone else! Their longstanding treaty with the Time Lords was solid as bedrock. They might dislike the current state of affairs on Gallifrey...but they were still valued for their counsel, and anything that affected the Third Zone would affect them in even the smallest of ways.

The Doctor paid only surface attention to the opening preliminaries; he kept his wits open to notice if anything was different or out of the ordinary; so far so good—or no good. He pondered the multitudinous currents running under the strange waters of the station. _All these people present had significant Historical ties with Gallifrey. Except for the absent Karn. Interesting. Karn was especially interested in communicating with the Time Lords now...thanks to one of his future selves...well. Technically this body was a temporal anomaly, exactly like it had been an anamoly to his Third Self over Omega's business. Just an anomaly in another aspect of Time._

He wondered again if his "keepers" knew he was aware of his future incarnations. Even a little bit of foreknowledge would make them _very_ unhappy. As if it was his fault the Temporal Tides kept washing him ashore here and there...or that he liked a bit of astral travel.

Astral travel had saved his sanity more than once in his early years of incarceration, when days to weeks, even months could pass with him in isolation, completely alone and with no one to talk to...his body had been trapped but his mind had craved freedom to the extent that it had been less risky to journey mentally—it was that or worry about his sanity.

Astral travel, alas, meant procuring information that was always hard to retrieve and not always clear. It was also quite dangerous when you had things like The Great Intelligence or the Valeyard still mucking about.

Of course, the so-called Great Intelligence had stopped attacking him in the astral plane after that last mishap...the Doctor quietly and fervently hoped its disembodied brains were _still_ whimpering with psychic migraines. Nothing like a little help from the Brigadier when you want to teach someone or something a good lesson...

A Silence slipped over the room.

Finally.

The Tribunal never moved, but all attention slithered to them. The Doctor was glad he and Jamie were a good two yards away.

He was a good sight more grateful when the air thickened, a wheezing hum rang in their bones, and an extremely angry Sontaran High Fleet Commander appeared inside a transparent force field cube.

_Well. Now we know why the Sisterhood of Karn aren't here, don't we? _The Doctor asked himself with painful irony. If there was anything that would send the Sisterhood into a fury, it would be a Sontaran. Around him a muted variation on chaos was racketing about the Courtroom, bouncing and bouncing off gabbling tongues and mouths. Stone-faced Castellans moved to make themselves visible as the level of control wavered.

_And to think I was bored to my back molars just a minute ago... I miss being bored..._

* * *

1Evil of the Daleks


End file.
